Look, even without the threat of four-wall counseling by Jimbo, I have massive respect for the folks in Special Forces. Read about what they do, go through, how hard they work – it’s all amazing.
…and then, sometimes there’s stuff like this.
Apparently CBS did a 1-hour special on an ODA in Afghanistan, reported by a comely young blonde Brit named Lara Logan.
I just watched it, and winced both at the reporting – the amazing shallowness – and at the behavior of the team as reported.
I found out about the show through Baba Tim over at Free Range International – a site you should be reading if you aren’t already.
His critical commentary on one key incident in the show – where one of the team fired on an advancing truck – seems tactically pretty darn sound to me, and strategically, his criticism couldn’t be more spot on:
When you live behind walls everything on the other side of those walls is a threat. When you isolate your forces from the population you are supposed to “protect,” then your forces have no ability to distinguish friend from foe, threat from normal routine, the good from the bad. Gen McChrystal can gob on all he wants about the importance of “COIN” and getting to know the people blah blah blah … it doesn’t matter because he sets the operational rules here, and under his rules no conventional American troops can leave a FOB unless they have at least four MRAPS and 16 riflemen. How are you supposed to “protect the people” if you can only roll around in large road-bound convoys? How can you “protect the people,” if every night all your people have to be back on the big box FOB’s eating ice cream and pecan pie?
These SF guys are supposed to be the ones who know how to operate outside the big bases with the local population, but did you notice where they live? On a big box FOB, isolated and removed from their Afghan charges which is obvious, because none of them spoke a word of Dari or Pashto. My children can get through formal greetings in both Pashto or Dari and they were here just a few months – it is just not that hard to learn these things when you live in the local environment. Those SF teams should be out here free ranging with guys like Bot, Mullah John, Panjiwai Tim and myself. They are good troops being poorly served by commanders who keep them isolated and removed from the people they are supposed to be protecting. They will never be able to gain the situational awareness required to do real COIN if they remain confined to the Big Box FOBs. That is the real story and as usual the MSM missed it.
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I didn’t see a problem with the conduct of the Green Berets.
Bottom line – the GB hit something he was NOT aiming at. Situational awareness is irrelevant in that case. And no amount of hobnobbing with locals is going to let you see through trees, so absent conditions that allow the use of visible beam laser pointers (which soldiers began using, successfully, in Iraq to get people’s attention with no gunfire), warning shots didn’t strike me as inappropriate.
If a shot riccochets badly, sometimes that’s just the crappy luck of war. And clearly, no-one feels worse about it than the guy who pulled the trigger. If there are lessons to pull from this incident, they’ll be pulled.
As for the FOB angle, if true I’d agree with Baba Tim. The problem is, I can’t be sure that’s true for the Green Berets, based on what I saw.
For the rest of the regular force, it’s an issue. But there 2 related bits to consider.
One is what “protect the population” means, when you have insurgencies in cities and the countryside, and limitations on numbers of troops. Protect the population in cities, because there are more of them, and fixing that later is harder and the terrain negates more advanced army capabilities? The danger is that you get a hostile, opium-growing countryside in response, and the cities don’t really remain secure. Vid. the Soviet experience. Or, you can be out in the countryside in force, with long-range fire support on call, while the cities slip away from you and become future locations for very difficult set piece battles. Vid. Iraq.
So that’s a balance to watch, and the question of “where to put the Afghan troops ?” is a valid sub-question.
Two is, if you do send out those smaller teams, they’d better have the organic ability to call in precision firepower from artillery or air, and you’d better have enough of those assets to make coverage a realistic expectation for those you send. It’s not clear to me that this exists, though precision artillery and long-range MLRS rockets are changing the landscape.
Joe, na-uh. Two ricochets off a dirt road that hit three feet apart? That’s SuperLotto odds territory, and when faced with the improbable, I go for the likely…he shot at the truck or at what he assumed was cargo on the truck, breaking Rules #2, #3 and #4:
#2: Never aim your gun at something you’re not willing to destroy;
#3: Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target;
#4: Be sure of your target and be sure of the background.
Not to mention that he set himself up at the worst possible place, given the curve of the road. I was actually wondering about that before he started shooting.
Bad operator, no halal MRE.
Stuff happens in wartime, for sure. But even before I read Tim’s (scathing) comments on it, I was “huh?” about this one.
Marc
I am not really all that interested in watching the show as it should be recalled that Lara Logan is a dirty tramp who has slept her way around several war zones. Seriously.
Mr. Lynch from Free Range makes a great point and it is one of our biggest failures. Those dudes should have moved there and just be coming home a couple of times a year to visit. Sadly No.
Cordially,
Uncle J