General McChrystal is concerned about the strategic effects of tactical actions:
The new American commander in Afghanistan said he would sharply restrict the use of airstrikes here, in an effort to reduce the civilian deaths that he said were undermining the American-led mission…
Even in the cases of active firefights with Taliban forces, he said, airstrikes will be limited if the combat is taking place in populated areas — the very circumstances in which most Afghan civilian deaths have occurred. The restrictions will be especially tight in attacking houses and compounds where insurgents are believed to have taken cover.
“Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly,” General McChrystal told a group of his senior officers during a video conference last week. “We can lose this fight.”
Air power can a tremendous force multiplier when fighting against an insurgency dispersed over broad distances, where the place, timing and tempo of operations are largely dictated by the insurgents themselves. The Talibs, like Mao’s guerrillas, are free to swim through through the people like fish through the sea, firing and then either fading away to slit throats another day or else surrounding themselves with human shields, counting on our humanity to save them from the fate they so richly deserve – a fate, by they way, to which they claim to aspire. If we kill them where we find them in the most efficient way, they hope to turn their own destruction into a propaganda victory.
Ground force concentrations that finally find and fix these phantoms would greatly prefer to finish them without having to dig them out from mud-walled complexes in hand to hand combat. While it’s hard to see how doing so would save the lives of the many non-combatants unwillingly pinned between coalition fires and the Taliban, it would undoubtedly raise the butcher’s bill to an unacceptable level for our forces.
Casualty counts vary greatly between coalition forces, locals and the Afghan national government. They are probably higher than characteristically optimistic military analysts reckon, but undoubtedly less than those generated locals angling for financial compensation. The Karzai government in turn uses the moral advantage generated by non-combatant casualties for political leverage against a coalition that has grown increasingly skeptical of its leadership while simultaneously offering the government a money favoring opportunity with dispersed villagers it lacks the reach, resources or will to support more traditionally.
Given all that, the collateral damage caused in these tactical actions has a strategic impact because we concede that it does – our perception shapes our reality. In the most recent provocation in Granai, Afghan National Army forces came into contact with a strong force of Taliban and summoned US Marines to assisst. When the Talibs went to ground, the Marines called in air strikes.
This new guidance will mean that rather taking the fight to enemy concentrations, the coalition – and ANA – will have to interdict them either as they move to population centers or as they try to fade away. The ANA is still too unreliable, and coalition forces are still too few, to be everywhere in sufficient numbers to clear, hold and build. It seems at least questionable that another 20,000 or so can tip the balance in the Pashtun south: Helmand and Kandahar provinces, to name only two, consist of 1.6 million people dispersed over 110k square kilometers. And while the Afghan surge is roughly the same size as those additional forces sent to Iraq in 2007, Afghanistan is almost 50% larger and its population more broadly dispersed.
These new limits on operational support to engaged tactical units will put pressure on the nine timeless principles of warfare: objective – unless the objective is to “do no harm” to anyone – offensive, mass, economy of force, security, surprise and simplicity while leaving maneuver in rough balance; we still own the air for what that’s now worth, but our heavily armored ground forces cannot scamper about easily as the sandal-clad Talibs.
But hey, we still have unity of command – at least within our own sectors – so maybe one out of nine ain’t bad.
It has been said so often as to become trite through repetition, but there is no exclusively military solution to Afghanistan. That said, there is no other kind of solution that can be implemented outside a militarily secure environment, and it seems to me that this new guidance takes an arrow from the quiver. In doing so, General McChrystal probably hopes to at least minimize the number of new enemies we make each time we kill the old ones, and guard his flanks from Afghan politics.
Seeing this through truly will require dedication to a “long war.”
“Air power contains the seeds of our own destruction if we do not use it responsibly,” General McChrystal told a group of his senior officers during a video conference last week. “We can lose this fight.”
Especially if the number of US/NATO KIA/WIA takes an upward tick due to a more conservative use of airpower, we will lose the popular support on this side of the fight. Years ago at NavSea we had a discussion with someone from DARPA on smart air launched weapons that made a boom just a little bigger than a couple of hand grenades. Could be fuzed to go thru a couple of floors an explode deep within a building without taking whole structure down. But against mud huts? Maybe just a smart nose attached to 1000 lbs of pre-stressed concrete. Either that or drop piglets.
G-Man/
I vote for piglets.
VX, not long ago, his Obamaness steped out of Marine One with a piglet under each arm. The Marine SGT. saluted smartly and commented “nice pigs sir! The ONE upbraded the SGT and told him these were not just any pigs but pure-bread, registered, Arkansas razorbacks. “In fact, I got one for my Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton, and the other one for the Speaker of the House, Mrs. Pelosi. To which the SGT responded: “Excellent trade sir!”
xairboss/
BWAHAHAHA! That Sgt is one sharp troop! Gotta get him promoted below the zone at the next go-round!
PS: You GOTTA hit PIG-MAN’s site on the link I provided below!
Pure-bread???? LOL, must be close to supper here on the east coast.
PS to G-Man/
Either that or call for “PIG-MAN.” Go See!!!@
http://fawstin.blogspot.com
(An answer to a Captain America apparently so PC these days he’s unwilling to take on Islam.)
VX: I guess you would recall “ChickenMan”? Maybe he needs a farewell tour – for the ‘WWW’. http://www.danoday.com/chickenman/
SPAZ/
LOL!! God yes! My all-time favorite! First heard it in the original in spring, 1965 of my Jr. yr. in college. Would run twice daily, the org. around 1100CST in Baton Rouge, than a 4pm rpt. I can recall some of the episodes almost word for word! The Dog-Lady et al, as his arch nemesis, the Commissioner and his Sec. Miss Helfinger. ALL the characters were great!! And the plots were side-splittingly funny. A great take-off on the old radio melodramas in style, with the deep-voiced announcer at the end previewing upcoming episodes in dramatic voice; “Wellll, looks like Chicken-man is in a fine mess this time, will he……..?” “Tune in tomorrow at this same time for further……” Been meaning to order the collection. Thanx for reminding me, I’d better get on it…just found it’s existence a few months ago when I started googling when the subj. came up one day…
Well, I’ll take flak for my comments, but what the h3ll.
Civilians will die regardless of whether we use airstrikes or not. Our attempts to reduce civilian casualties is honorable and commendable, but it is foolish and will cost us American lives, more so than we would lose otherwise.
If we misjudge the target and kill civilians, our enemies and our own press will hold it against us. If we hold back air support, then our enemies will simply herd a bunch of civilians into a building, blow it up, and blame it on our airstrikes. Their enabling press and our own press will fall right into place and we will be guilty with no hope to prove otherwise.
Even if we could PROVE that our enemies had killed all the civilians, it wouldn’t matter. Our military would be accused of “doctoring” or “fabricating” the evidence.
We need to use airstrikes wherever and whenever we need to in order to complete our assigned missions and protect the lives of our own people. Plain, simple, straight up.
Our leaders need to understand that we will gain security only through the overwhelming and unremitting use of force, force so great and terrible that it makes our enemies lose heart.
People die in war. Innocents die in war. It is the cruel nature of the beast. We cannot stop it. We cannot prevent it. We can hope to mitigate it, but we incur great risk if we do so.
We either take the war to our enemies, and that right soon, or we dig in at home and await their onslaught here.
If we do the latter, the deaths will be American civilians, and they will be incurred at an order of magnitude many times removed from the civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
respects,
AW1Tim/
Exactly–and this is where REAL political leadership and intellectual courage comes in. It is the duty of the Chief Executive to publicly and forcefully make the case as you outlined, and to frame the issue for both the American public and the int. community such that the onus is put squarely on the aggressor without flinching from the disapproval of “received opinion” from the leftist dominated chattering classes–the media, academia, self-selected “intellectuals,” et al. IOW, refuse to buy into the current leftist and Islamic Jihadist paradigm and create/frame a new psychological reality/paradigm of our own to color the conversation so that our actions are bathed in an entirely different and less pejorative light than is currently the case.
But then that would be asking a lot of certain people….
Don’t blame the man. He’s working under white house orders to orchestrate a scenario where the US has to turn tail and abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban.
Clausewitz’s Principles of War do not play well in a counterinsurgency. As a contrast to those “timeless nine principles, consider the far more applicable principles of COIN which dismisses in general, air power:
COIN Principles
Legitimacy as a main objective.
Unity of effort.
Political primacy.
Understanding the environment.
Intelligence as the driver for operations.
Isolating insurgents from their cause and support.
Security under the rule of law.
Then consider the imperatives:
Manage information and expectations.
Use measured force.
Learn and adapt.
Empower at the lowest levels.
Support the host nation.
Finally, consider the paradoxes:
The more you protect your force, the less secure you are.
The more force you use, the less effective you are.
Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction.
The best weapons for counterinsurgency do not fire bullets.
Them doing something poorly is sometimes better than us doing it well.
If a tactic works this week, it will not work next week; if it works in this province, it will not work in the next.
Tactical success guarantees nothing.
(Military Review, March-April 2006)
Airpower in COIN at best has little positive effect, and at worse, can be extremely counterproductive.
Unfortunately, the master Carl von C.’s dogs don’t hunt in COIN.
One thing that strikes me as missing from Lex’s analysis is the affect on the local Afghan villages and/or tribes. If I’m reading the above correctly, he doesn’t seem to think that the locals play any role in long-term operations.
It was the involvement of village and tribal leaders that built up to the “Anbar Awakening” transformation in Iraq. Our operations never became truly effective until we established relations with local authorities, as opposed to the top-down approach originally pursued by the Bush administration.
I’m not going to claim that McChrystal’s approach is infallible, nor that it will inevitably produce victory. I will claim that we need to get the locals on our side as allies against the Taliban, just as we did in Iraq against AQ.
The last I heard, General McChrystal is a full-up professional who was involved with the capture of Hussein, the death of Zarqawi, and vital to the 2007 surge in Iraq. If he says limiting air strikes will aid success in Afghanistan, I’m at least willing to give the man a chance.
After all, the “screw the locals, bomb ‘em!” approach worked so well in Vietnam…
Flit, some of those are good principles that senior officers are constitutionally incapable of–such as doing nothing even when it’s the best thing to do.
But respectfully, McChrystal has been burned by air power that was controlled by another unnamed service. As CG, he took the hit for another service’s failure to exercise due diligence in employing the ROE. You’ll probably still see helos in close support, probably AC-130s, but there will be a lot less air-dropped munitions. And in this environment, much as I don’t like the risk, it may well be the wisest choice.
Casey,
That’s not my point, and that’s not what happened in Vietnam. It’s a nice soundbite, for sure, but totally out of context and unsupportable by facts.
Respects,
Make a note for historical purposes. You’ll rarely see this, but I find myself in agreement with fliterman.
Now, if I was a troop on the ground, I’d probably have a somewhat different take. But the fact of the matter is, after the pounding from the air the Afghanis took from the Soviet Union, we’d be well advised to minimize its use.
AW1Tim/
I gotta get you down to N.O. so we can plot to “take over the world”* over some offerings from the green faerie–maybe at the Old Absinthe House smack in the Quarter, per chance. (the Napoleon House would provide an equally good atmosphere in which to plot…) Maybe then after our plots are hatched the world will appreciate our genius besides Wylie E.
h/t “Pinky and the Brain”
I can hear it now…
“What are we gonna do tonight, Brain?”
“Same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world”.
Can I help?
Virgil,
All I gotta do is find a sitter for a few days…
The trick is to keep from getting off at Jackson, cause there’s a couple buckets o’blood I’d like to check out there as well.
You want that Tim, we can easily find you one or two around Magazine St.
Lets start at Mandinas for a whole oyster loaf and a bowl of gumbo, and wash it down with several Dixies
Byron, you keep forgetting the turtle soup (with sherry) and the oyster and artichoke soup. We need to step you up a notch. Had a bell pepper stuffed with shrimp and meat that an elephant couldn’t have finished at Mandinas about a month ago. Man, dat good stuff!.
Sazarac at the bar, trout amandine, and I can die a happy man. What do you guys think of the post-storm Mandina’s?
Scott/
Sure not the same as the old place since they enlarged it, that’s for sure. I’m just so glad it’s open at all that I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Don’t know if you know, but it was touch and go if they would ever commit the $ to re-open. The T-P had a 3(IIRC)-part series on the whole internal debate (Open? y/n Enlarge? y/n etc.) shortly after it re-opened. Was no sure thing, that’s for sure…..
xairboss/
Never had the sherry turtle soup @Mandina’s for some reason, but the stuff @ Commanders is probably the iconic soup in the city–can’t be beat. (But would we be/look/act “respectable” enough for Commanders? I mean, a bunch of aging, sea-farin’ “Pirates”–even if winged–and a busdriver?
)
PS to Boss: I don’t know if I want Byron along with us–I’m still pi***d at him ’cause his waistline is still the same as when he was 19…and he keeps rubbing it in…
VX, with looks like mine, they will probably give us a discount.
I can see the new badger strategy in the stan. Take fire from a house, send in the hi-speed unmanned tunnel driller and 500 pound det charge then stand around and gaze wonderlingly into the sky and observe loudly, with much pointing that there are no aircraft at all in the vicinity and then detonate the charge under the house. Just another tragic own goal by the taliban….sad sad. When will they learn explosive safety?
Curtiss/
Sounds like a plan to me. Where can I by stock in the Co. making the tunnel-driller? Either that or marry the owner’s daughter…..but my wife and age might unfortunately preclude THAT option on my road to insider trading and newly-found riches…
I’ve been worried for a while that we were too concerned with playing defensive counterinsurgency games instead of carryring the fight to the enemy. We’ve forgotten the lesson that ADM Hayward taught us when he said, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about ‘the threat’. Let US be the threat!”
We need to be thinking more about how to turn our firepower against the enemy home territory. They’ve got a base…and that base can be broken.
Lex, I believe that the answer to the problem is contained in your premise of a “long war”. The reason anyone would be committed to fighting a “long war” is because they lack the will to fight a war.
If they are an existential threat to our National security, then treat it as such with enough force to cause even onlookers to shrink back while giving thanks that it was not them. If they are not an existential threat, then keep out of it. In it to win it, quickly and everwhelmingly, or not at all.
Grinding up our best and disposing of them in body bags so as to preserve delicate sensitivities is immoral.
Tim, I’ll admit the last sentence in my post was a bit of a “sound bite,” but I’ll also note that you ignored the substance above that bite.
I’ll note that -after your reply- the thread suddenly turned to trading recipes.
Ok, Curtis made a rather clever suggestion, but it isn’t strongly linked to the real world, no?
What I find truly distressing is that the most common reaction to McChrystal’s strategy on this blog relates to near-stereotypical chest-pounding about “our boys,” without respect the fact that casualty rates in both Afghanistan and Iraq are less than one-third of those in Vietnam, which were lower than earlier 20th-century wars. In other words, the Southwest Asia campaigns show lower casualty rates than any other US war for over a century. Yet still some posture as if we were re-enacting the bloodbath of Ypres.
Folks here have already quoted various authorities, and I’ll add one to the mix:
Casey,
You must understand your enemy. Let us be really really clear that the enemy we face in Iraq has almost no semblance to the enemy we face in Afghanistan. Should we choose to fight in Persia, that enemy would share almost no resemblance to our enemy in Iraq or Afghanistan. Do you understand that? Dragging in Vietnam as somehow germane is stupid. It’s right up there with pointing out how die hard the French were for fighting back during the allied landings in French North Africa during WWII.
My guys do special ops, not special warfare and are unified under CTF56, a task force I helped create a very long time ago. We may not lose our men in the numbers suffered at Ypres or the Somme but the number of EOD specialists lost in this war is truly regrettable. For a while it was a couple of young men a week. All of them are brave and I am honored by their service.
This is classic David Kilcullen. Influential with Petraeus, he has long argued that insurgency can only be defeated by moving from enemy-centric warfare to population-centric warfare. The biggest success in the Iraq surge, as reported by West, Ricks, and others, was to see the MOE as not being AQI fatalities, but Iraqi civilian casualties — lower the better.
Many problems in this approach, most of them American military cultural. We don’t have targeting systems that work that way. Once a target is nominated, our system will pursue it to destruction. But Kilcullen’s approach is why nominate it in the first place? The poor lt. in contact wants the shooting to stop killing his men. In a culture raised on instant grits, the faster way to stop is steel on target.
What McChrystal is putting in place, is an idea that stopping the shooting, may produce long term negative side effects greater than the unfortunate US casualties that lt. in contact is trying to prevent. Kilcullen argues civilian casualties can produce “accidental guerrillas” — and that, in the long term, is what will defeat us.
Scott/
I SWEAR I hadn’t read casey’s Sun Tzu quote when I used my water analogy to zane a few minutes ago,LOL! More to the point of your comment here, I totally agree with the “accidental guerrilla” bit–saw it first-hand in Vietnam. My point is that in terms of P-stan, while it also is no good long-term to embitter the mountain tribes-men bordering A-stan, short-term it’s the lesser of two evils politically for a US administration not wanting to be seen publicly at cross-purposes with the A-stan Govt.–because if Karzi falls, we’ve got NOTHING–no legitimacy whatsoever, around which to build our opposition to the re-imposition of Taliban control and the poss re-entry of AQ. IOW, we’re back to square one, day one, with nothing to show for it but loss of lots of blood and treasure (mostly treasure, quite frankly.)