Scholar and military analyst Robert Kaplan is just back from a month with the troops in Afghanistan. He's concerned about creeping bureaucratization of the war effort there, and the implications for the larger War on Terror. Thank God for the non-coms.
Instead of powering down to a flattened hierarchy of small, autonomous units dispersed over a wide area--what the 1940 Marine "Small Wars Manual" recommends for fighting a guerrilla insurgency--we have barricaded ourselves into a mammoth, Cold War-style base at Bagram that drains resources from the fire bases. It is ironic that just as the Pentagon is proposing a more light and lethal world-wide basing posture (with many smaller footprints rather than a few large ones in Korea and Europe), in Afghanistan, whose mountains and tribes make it the most unconventional of battlefields, we have reverted to such an antiquated arrangement.Posted by Alan at December 20, 2003 01:11 AMWe are fighting a world-wide counterinsurgency, and you don't hunt down pockets of insurgents over vast swaths of the earth with large bases, large infantry columns, and central control. Operation Iraqi Freedom only shaped the battlefield for the war in Iraq, which is of a small, unconventional kind. Because insurgencies vary from country to country, and even within countries, it is necessary to divest power from places like Washington and Bagram to the edges of the command structure, where noncoms at Advanced Operating Bases constitute the sensitive, fingertip points of defense policy--tailored to the particular situation in their respective microregions. For example, while the U.S. seeks to fold the Afghan Militia Forces into the newly created Afghan National Army, in some provinces these same militias are vital to the security of our special forces fire bases. Therefore, decisions about integrating these forces must be left to individual base commanders, who are familiar with local personalities.
The U.S. military is the world's best because its sergeants and warrant officers are without equal. It is a matter of better utilizing them. Mistakes will occur, like the children killed recently near Gardez, but remember that Green Berets have been regularly saving the lives of young mine victims in rural Afghanistan.
In El Salvador in the 1980s, 55 special forces troops beat back a guerrilla insurgency while gradually integrating renegade militias into a newly professionalized national army. They had advantages, though. A force cap kept the number of uniformed Americans in the country from mushrooming, and except for some basic guidelines they were given relatively limited instructions. So the question is: Can we find our way back to 2001 in Afghanistan and to 2002 in the Philippines, when the Fifth and First Special Forces Groups led the way to military transformation?
via the WSJ's OpinionJournal