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Subject:
Afghanistan, Mountain Warfare, and the U.S. Army
Four Federal Pensions
3/24/2002 11:13:51 AM
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This article is a bit long, but I think it is a very interesting and informative piece. One lesson to be learned is that this war in Afghanistan is far from over.
link
"Mountain Warfare is Not the Only Thing Slowing Down the U.S. Army"
By Jason Vest
March 22, 2002
Last fall I interviewed a number of current and former CIA officers who worked the Pakistan-Afghanistan border during the days of the mujahideen's fight against the Soviets. I also spoke with current and retired military officers, some with combat experience ranging from Vietnam, to the Gulf War, or the Balkans. The war in Afghanistan was in its earliest stages then, and most of the people I interviewed asked me to keep their comments off the record for the time being, "hoping against hope," as one put it, "that this will all work out."
Yet the general sense among them was one of reservation -- not because they thought the Taliban would hold on to power but out of concerns about the state of U.S. military strategy and intelligence. Would the United States field the right troops at the right times in the right places? Would the best people be sought out and listened to in devising strategy and tactics? Were American forces really prepared to fight in the rugged, high-altitude conditions of Afghanistan? Would civilian leadership devise a sensible overall strategy, and would sound military tactics follow?
In recent weeks, I spoke again with some of the same military personnel. Naturally, all are in favor of terminating al Qaeda with extreme prejudice, and all are confident that the United States and its allies will eventually prevail. But they're also concerned about how easily that end will be achieved.
All expressed reservations about segments of the military chain of command -- particularly the Army's - who are engaging in wishful thinking about resources, capabilities, and political realities. They warned of an operational myopia creating a situation that's quite the opposite of the theory of domininant battlespace knowledge that is at the heart of the "Revolution in Military Affairs" or "transformation" being espoused by the bureaucracy, celebrated by the pundits, and longed for by the industrialists.
With the war entering a new phase of protracted guerrilla and counter-guerrilla operation in the mountains, my aim in this essay is to examine some of the ramifications of this wishful thinking and myopia.
One of the biggest problems now afflicting the U.S. military flows out of the two things separating it from virtually any other force in the world -- it's large size (in manpower and materiel) and its high-complexity technology (particularly the "networked" array of robotic sensors, computers, and precision-guided weapons and their accompanying theories of friction-free warfare). When applied in combat, the combination of size and technology leaves one with the impression that the defeat of an enemy of any size, anywhere, is inevitable.
So, however and whenever success is realized, most Americans are content to assume that everything worked as it should have -- or if they didn't, it really doesn't matter -- since the ostensible objectives were achieved. Politicians of every stripe and careerist soldier-bureaucrats -- often abetted by less-than-knowledgeable or cheerleading journalists and self-interested industrialists -- thrive on such views, because the perceived end can be easily spun to obscure flaws in the means.
The war in Kosovo should have been a warning about the psychological dangers of this kind of incestuous amplification: Recall how liberal interventionists praised it as model of 21st Century war, worthy of emulation in other theaters, because precision aerial bombardment achieved a political purpose, as one enthusiast put it, by "stopping the ethnic cleansing and allowing the Kosovars to go home".
Echoing such views on the martial front were those of the influential military historian John Keegan (and others) who decreed that Operation Allied Force had shown ground forces to be bordering on obsolescence.
Unfortunately, these assessments neglected realities that concerned many of the professional soldiers I have interviewed over the last several years. Let's look first at Kosovo and then segue to Afghanistan.
Some officers, for example, pointed out that thousands of Kosovar lives might have been saved, a refugee crisis likely averted, the economic destruction of Serbia avoided, and the crisis window more quickly closed if, rather than relying on high-tech airborne ordnance, Operation Allied Force had been designed around a rapid deployment to Kosovo of highly mobile ground forces backed up by close air-support.
To be sure, we would have incurred casualties, but these officers believe a more decisive strategic outcome might have set the grand-strategic stage for a more durable stability in the Balkans. They note that after more than two months of sustained bombing by an alliance of 13 of the world's most advanced nations, the political "end" was ultimately achieved due to Russian intervention, coupled with a reduction of Allied demands, promulgated at the G8 meeting in May 1999, to a level Serbia had effectively agreed to at Rambouillet prior to the war.
Bear in mind, a key facet of the military objective was not achieved: the prime target of our military efforts, the Yugoslav Army, rolled out of Kosovo largely intact - we destroyed only 14 tanks, 12 self-propelled guns, 14 armored personnel carriers, and 6 towed artillery pieces, not the hundreds claimed by Nato's headquarters. But as had been the case in Vietnam and the Gulf War, once again the military brass used a linguistic sleight-of-hand to grossly exaggerate the amount of damage done, telling the American people that hundreds of these vehicle had been destroyed. The real effect of the bombing would have remained an unknown reality were it not for a few courageous military officers who took the initiative to get the truth out. While many in America reveled in the outcome as an technological tour de force, quite a few current and former officers saw it as another example of how the US partially chose, and partially was unable, to go engage an enemy operating with a more unconventional set of tactics, underscoring some real shortcomings in US military cumbersome logistics and its continued adherence to the obsolete attrition doctrine of methodical battle.
Its worth recalling the cognitive dissonance of Kosovo, because today, we're moving into a similar albeit far more dangerous set of circumstances.
With pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda "bubbling up all over Afghanistan," to borrow the memorable phrase of a British defense official quoted in a recent issue of the Telegraph, cognitive dissonance will be more difficult to ignore in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the emerging theory of "virtual attrition" suggests that the military is again falling prey to its techno-seductions.
This can be seen in statements made after the completion of Operation Anaconda in the Shah-i-Kot Valley. The Army commander on the scene told reporters we killed between 500 and 800 enemy fighters but allied Afghan commanders said they found on 50 to 60 bodies and our Canadian allies say there only a few direct engagements [see Boston Globe, March 20, pg. 29]. Nevertheless the American commander has stuck to his claim. The logic supporting his claim can be found in a page 1 report of the March 19 issue of the New York Times, which said "Senior Pentagon officials also declined today to estimate the number of enemy fighters killed. But they said surveillance images indicate that few enemy fighters have fled the region, suggesting that many, if not most, had died in the fierce fighting."
In other words, our surveillance technology (especially the TV cameras in the Predator drone) enables American commanders to see the battlefield with so much |
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