General McChrystal recently worried that our tactical decisions in Afghanistan might have strategic consequences. It turns out that the reverse may also be true:
NATO-led forces are investigating the death of four Marines in eastern Afghanistan after their commanders reportedly rejected requests for artillery fire in a battle with insurgents, the Pentagon said on Wednesday…
A McClatchy newspapers’ journalist who witnessed the battle reported that a team of Marine trainers made repeated appeals for air and artillery support after being pinned down by insurgents in the village of Ganjgal in eastern Kunar province.
The U.S. troops had to wait more than an hour for attack helicopters to come to their aid and their appeal for artillery fire was rejected, with commanders citing new rules designed to avoid civilian casualties, the report said.
Four young Marines paid the butcher’s bill. We have to do better than this.
I’m sure everyone knew this sort of thing was coming… it was just a matter of time. Let’s just hope this is the first and LAST such occurrence and Gen. McChrystal comes to his senses regarding the ROE. I’m not that hopeful, tho. Sad.
Sweet Jesus. This is Vietnam all over again. This is precisely the kind of thing that happens when acceptable targets are determined far from the battlefield.
Who doesn’t remember looking down into Haiphong harbor with wing pods full of 250lb bombs and 5″ rockets and no authority to fire any of it?
I guess this is what happens when anyone with an institutional memory has past their ‘use by’ date.
…………………
In “Strategy for Defeat” By ADM Sharp, his contention was we lost (and the Vietnamese lost) many more people because the “doves” wanted a kinder, gentler war, where the “hawks” wanted to just mine Haiphong and cut off the war material from the Soviet Union, ending the bloodshed. His evidence? When we did finally do it, they were at the table in a very, very short time…as they knew we had them by the short hairs.
OTOH, the North Vietnamese, as radical as they were, actually had some desire to live to reunite their nation. While they didn’t want us meddling in their affairs, they just didn’t want us meddling in their affairs. AQ…well, until were subjugated or dead, this crew will still have a bone to pick….
ooops! passed
What ever happened to CBS showing pictures of those killed in Afghanistan and Iraq on the evening news? All of the sudden it doesn’t make the headlines any more.
This is just going to start encouraging the use of “human shields” by the Taliban.
My son is heading over there in the very near future. I have already expressed to his commander what my response will be should he be injured, or, God-forbid, killed over there due to supporting fires being denied because civilians might be harmed. I guaranteed him that my son would NOT be the only casualty in such a thing were to occur.
Americans should be outraged that such actions are taking place. We are there to kill the enemy and destroy his capability to wage war, to harm us in any manner. Our hands should not be ties in any way, other than those we accepted through internatuinal treaties.
It is unfortunate that innocents are harmed and killed in war, but it is something that will never be eliminated.
In this situation, are folks in charge seem blind to the fact that innocent blood will be on the hands of our enemies, who seek shelter amongst civilians, who hide in churches, in homes and hospitals, knowing our hesitancy to fire upon places we consider to be refuge for innocents.
Our enemies have become well versed on how to use our own chivalry against us, and for their own bolstering and propaganda.
If we are to allow them to continue in this manner, then we might as well remove all of our forces NOW. Holding fire to prevent civilian casualties is, in my mind, tantamount to murder of our own troops.
We need to get away from Lawfare, and back to Warfare.
Our soldiers deserve better leaders than the scum-sucking, bottom-dwelling bassidges that are currently in charge.
Nothing new here…the grunts on the ground have always paid the price for command stupidity…it is indeed the ultimate betrayal of those at the tip of the spear… Best
This is bad any way you cut it. I have skin in this game as I have a son slogging it out over the s***hole called Nawa. (I noted this over at my place (Insert Gratuitous plug here): http://voicefromthenoise.blogspot.com/2009/09/roe-in-af-killing-marines.html) But there is a good counter narrative over at Blackfive (http://www.blackfive.net/) that I encourage everyone to step over and read. The claim there is not the orders so much as the interpretation of them by the local authorities who had control of the big guns.
In any case, three Good Marines and one Good Sailor were sacrificed by this maddening concept that puts all of our men and women second to killing the enemy. Collateral damage aside, all of ‘them’ are worth even one of ours. Mine especially!!
BT: Jimmy T sends.
“Collateral damage aside, all of ‘them’ are worth even one of ours. Mine especially!!”
I cannot understand how anyone could disagree with that. I thought that was THE lesson learned o’ so long ago- if you aren’t going to fight (ie. kill the enemy forces), don’t go.
Left unmentioned in most analysis made so far is the change all brabches of the services have made to the delivery of CAS. You will note that FACs of ANY kind–slow OR fast movers–and from any branch–are no longer used for the most part–depending instead on USAF gnd FACs/TACPs and even Army/Marine enlisted types to paint/id tgts. The ostensible reason for this being the lethality of shoulder fired SAMs etc., at low altitude, but one of the REAL, UNMENTIONED reasons is that the Army loves this arrangement as their own people in the field can no longer by-pass their own command & control chain of command and go directly to the airborne FAC who can then directly by-pass the entire Army command structure and either divert already airborne assets flying pre-plans for an immediate TIC request or request launch directly from the hot-pad for an immediate by direct link to AF DASC and/or TACC. Historically speaking, in practice even the most “dubious” of Army requests are honored by the AF who doesn’t want to be accused of letting down the Army which has historically complained long and bitterly about the quality of USAF cas.
But as we see in this instance under discussion, in the absence of an airborne USAF or Marine FAC, by forcing everything up the chain of command, the big kids can feel free to deny their own people CAS and/or organic arty for political reasons FAR more easily. Now the AF is loath to deny a direct Army TIC request via the airborne AF FAC by Army troops under fire in the field for all the inter-service political reasons of which we here are well aware, but I really don’t understand the Marines failure to honor TIC cas requests from their ownpeople–my experience is that big kids wearing Marine uniforms were even more eager to provide immediate cas to tic than anyone. (The arty I can understand as Marines over there are short of dedicated gun-tubes if I am correct on the matter.) There must have been a Borg-like absorption of the USMC into the USAF dominated TACC system or Vulcan mind-meld to have caused that to happen. Can anyone closer to the scene these days than I clarify?
The “Big Kids” on the Army side of the house have always hated the way their 2nd/lts and NCOs in the field were able to short-circuit and by-pass their own chain of command via the airborne USAF FAC, beginning in Vietnam. Now they don’t have to worry about that anymore–just their 2nd Lts and
PS: Last para should have been in parenthesis and ended by adding “and NCOs and enlisteds.”
Virgil,
My son is a Marine FastFAC. As far as I know, there are none in Afganistan. He and his squadron mates would love to go but there’s limited airfield space and, acording to him, the Air Force doesn’t like to share. To be fair, I’ve heard the Marines were not very good at it either at their facilities in Iraq.
One thing I am pretty sure of is that, given Marine Air’s total focus on the “guys on the ground”, if there were Marine FACS up they would have found a way to authorize dropping ordinance.
VX, You asked for a clarification… I’ll give you one…this was a giant fu*k-up and a few good men paid the ultimate price…it is and always has been my understanding that the senior guy in the sh*t calls in the FS/CAS not some REM-F…this assumption appears to be incorrect…rest assured that were I in this situation and been fortunate enough to survive I would immediately thereafter seek out the responsible individual and kick his uselsss ass…I know not a good career move…but I never aspired to be a lifer. Best
For a long time, release authority for all supporting fires has been creeping up the chain of command. We’re not quite back to the White House having the trigger, but we’re getting there.
To revise and extend my comments, this particular case is almost certainly a failure to properly plan fire support prior to the mission. Some media accounts said that the supporting artillery was an Army unit. Prior planning for FS is critical, and even more so when the supporting unit is not in the same service.
Did the maneuver unit have TRPs assigned and pre-cleared to fire? Why not? Did the supporting unit even know prior to the operation that they might be called to provide fires? It doesn’t really sound like it (but there is no direct evidence either way in published reports).
Did the maneuver unit and the supporting unit discuss ROEs and who would certify the missions met the ROE?
Blackfive is right, this isn’t the ROEs fault.
You’re right about that XBrad, always helps to have a few tubes pointed in the dir. of at least the right UTM Grid.Coord let alone pre-registered in. (Or do we even HAVE UTMs for Af? Should have after all this time, or does everything still have to be done by georef over there?
XBrad/
I mean, I know we’ve got GPS, but what’s it keyed into in terms of gnd map references? Questions like this proving it’s early “Fossil time” at the Virgil household….
We have maps for AF with the military grid reference system (MGRS) printed on them. When we first went over, I don’t think we had them in the geodetic reference system we needed them in, but that can be fixed quickly, and conversions can be made fairly quickly in the interim. A number of people took commercial and recreational GPS receivers, and almost all of those have practically every geodetic datum in them so they can make the conversions on the fly. I’m sure that NIMA has gotten everything together by now without having to worry about datum conversions these days.
I gave my son a Garmin Etrex to take with him to Iraq, and told him to leave set to WGS 84 (the DOD global datum for the GPS system) unless he was told otherwise by his superiors. I did the same for my former son-in-law as well. Iraq, however, was a bit different from AF. AF had to be remapped in our datum (WGS 84) which, these days, can be done fairly quickly.
For the uninitiated, the MGRS is a modern adaptation of the Universal Transverse Mercator grid originally developed by the old Army Map Service. It was later adopted by NATO, but I don’t know if it was after the MGRS was established or not.
Damn right we have to do better! Disgraceful!
-JC
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/AP/v-fullstory/story/1223901.html
Disgraceful.
I think we all know where this reluctance to use fire support is coming from, and it’s far above McChrystal’s level. Yes, there may have been planning/execution problems, but those problems are FAR more likely in an environment of extremely restrictive ROEs for fire support.
I don’t think there are many “hearts and minds” to win over there. I would imagine the vast majority of Afghan citizens are on the fence, waiting to see who the long-term strong horse is going to be. By acting like 400 lb weaklings, that boosts the islamists. I don’t think proving how loving we can be means a damn thing to a backwards, 10th century society with a history of savage warfare. All that matters is how strong we look – and act.
To paraphrase old G. Gorden Liddy in a priceless cameo role as a drug running bad guy on the old Miami Vice TV series: “Pain is a universal language everybody understands.” And the side in Af that can stand it the most and dish it out the most is the side that will earn the respect of Afghan tribesmen that have been fighting basically continuously on and off since the days of Alexander the Great.
Well, it’s hard to imagine anyone being more willing to inflict brutality than the Sovs did back in the day, and it didn’t get them anywhere. I get how you don’t want to kill neutrals/fence sitters. I don’t get how a troop gets pinned down like this inside the arty fan and can’t get fires.
Neither do I.
Ivan was more than willing to inflict much pain. They ended up taking more than they dished out thanx to our supplying Stinger missiles to the Muj guys over there. If anyone were willing to supply the Taliban as we supplied the Muj, we are actually in a worse position as the Soviets at least had relatively interior lines of supply. Ivan could pull out north. As for us? Let’s just say we have no friends on the AF “littoral.”
While I agree with Brad on arranging arty support, there is absolutely no excuse for denying those guys the support they needed. A number of heads should roll, starting with the firebase CO.
Yabitt the Soviets handed out pain pretty much indiscriminately, IIRC, Lex. I’m suggesting that “controlled pain” be applied to the Taliban only, NOT non-Taliban warlords/Tribsmen. This is NOT beyond the ken of man to accomplish. But in truth we will never solve the WHAM problem no matter how many children we inoculate, bridges, schoolhouses we build or irrigation ditches we dig. With SAFE areas like Pakistan to retreat to for R &R the Taliban can return at their leisure to overwhelm the locals and destroy all the WHAM-type “good works” accomplished to date, sowing doubt about both our ability and resolve to provide security. It’s MY belief that truly successful COIN ops are IMPOSSIBLE as long as adj SAFE areas exist. It was the problem in Algeria, Vietnam and now in Afghanistan. That’s why we should pick and chose among the tribes and give/bribe them the money and arms. THEY can out-wait the Taliban forever because they aren’t going anywhere either–and out-fight ‘em if we ply them with enough arms and money as they are the Talibans natural rivals–with us hovering over the horizon with air-support as/if needed in initial stages. Sort of like what was working in the end in Vietnam on a larger, more conventional-warfare scale until Congress pulled the logistics plug.
Lex, thanks for informing us about “the death of four Marines in eastern Afghanistan after their commanders reportedly rejected requests for artillery fire in a battle with insurgents”.
Since the Pentagon seems to have confirmed this outrageous news, and Marines do not show such little regard for each other, the impetus for this outrageous decision could only have come from the newly chastened, emboldened, and insidiously imbedded source Americans have yet to deal with fully – the @&#$ J.A.G.s.
Please prove me wrong, anybody!
You know if you replace USMC with “NYC fire dept” or “NYC police dept” you would have a major investigation about how some chief let his fire or police battalion down by failing to send in requested back-up/support. Why is this any different? “We didn’t send in additional police support for the officers engaged as we didn’t want to risk any civilian injuries” would surely result in a thorough house-cleaning.
I’m with AW1 – you want to confront the one responsible for the lack of back-bone when they return. Any loss is hard to take, ones that could be prevented like these are nothing short of a court-martial offense. I’d hate to be the one handing over the folded flag with “on behalf of a grateful nation …” on my lips.
Just yesterday some guy on some blog (sorry, I can’t remember where) was saying the GPS-guided Excalibur 155 round was a big waste of money, and that CAS could handle everything.
I know from what you guys have said that this was more a command screw-up and not a technological one, but it seems like this is exactly the situation Excalibur was made for. It’s supposed to have less than 10 meter CEP. Then again, the arty probably wasn’t using the Paladins or M777A2s that can fire it. Maybe they didn’t have the capability.
I don’t know. I just think of those guys calling for fire and not getting it and it makes me feel sick.
As I see it the problem in Afghanistan is not neutrals or fence sitters since all of them support the Taleban. I know who beats the Soviets for pure brutality and that would be the folks that carried out the Beslan school massacre. Those butchers planned to kill a thousand school kids and just about did.
US troops pass out of arty coverage when the US concedes the “moral” ground and the battlefield to the enemy and pretends that we are there winning the hearts and minds of the enemy. I knew a well educated, erudite first generation Pakistani Coast Guard officer that planned to take his American raised daughters back to Pakistan and wed them to his cousins when they were of age (15). If you don’t understand your enemy you end up conceding the fight.
I’m curious, how many of us doubt that the war against Terror is synonymous with a war against Islam?