All The King’s Horses (Some notes from a weekend of thought)
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08 October 2012
Terrain is the single most important factor in combat.
During the early days of the wars, back when everyone seemed to know we had won in Afghanistan, testimonials streamed from the battle zones about how badly the deserts treated our super-gear.
Batman could only dream about the techno-wonders we complained about. But we pleaded that the high temperatures, moon dust, and that terrible Brownian Motion could be the undoing of our high tech. (Send more money.)
Yet, no Einstein was required to see that the commotion over climate and dust avoided a few important realities; Iraqis and Afghans have lived there beyond the frayed edges of history, and today their televisions, motorbikes, and cars work, despite the sand and heat. Their helicopters still fly. Their AK-47s still burp flames and hot metal. (Yes, the Taliban really did have high-performance aircraft working.)
Eventually we stopped crying about the gear. Many of our own training centers are in U.S. deserts, and we have many times fought in deserts, yet somehow we still fielded gear that we said has difficulty in deserts. (Send more money.)
The truth is that desert terrain and weather have provided the finest moments for gadget warfare. Any major defense contractor purveying the modern high-tech would want to exhibit them on the perfect stage of Afghanistan, or against the Iraqi Army, so easily detected in wide open spaces, and hit with precision weapons. Our ships did not face major threats from high-tech missiles, or even basic sea mines, which still in 2012 remain serious threats.
In Afghanistan, what looks so wonderful against a low-tech enemy in made-for-Hollywood terrain will not shine brightly in triple-canopy jungles, or even in the dense forests of the Appalachians, or in the thick Florida swamps. Deserts are the last place to complain about our gear.
This dispatch is not an attempt to perturb military policy. Shelves of books already have been written by more qualified others, spanning many wars and generations. If performance is any measure, they did little good.
Yet it is vital to put some of these recent observations on paper while the memories remain fresh. These notes will not help the current military, any more than reading glasses and books will help an illiterate Afghan farmer who for seventy years has been set in his ways. But they may be of some use to rare historians, and the curious, who years later, wonder why we fumbled so in Afghanistan. These notes might be of value to some as-yet unborn commander, and provide insight to our political and military failure against enemies who easily should have been defeated.
This dispatch is not comprehensive. It represents a weekend of effort. A small donation for posterity.
With some exceptions, the Afghanistan battlefields are mostly treeless, even bald. Advanced optics of many sorts can see for miles. Today, some optics are outfitted with software to highlight potential targets. So, there you are, using a thermal imager, when a little box appears. It draws your attention away from the warm haystack, to something manlike under sparse trees. Not only does the imager enhance the eyes; it also tells us where to look, and the precise coordinates of the object of attention.
Ghor Province, Afghanistan
At night, low humidity, crystal-clear skies, and practically zero light pollution allows operators to easily identify targets.
The logistics to Afghanistan are hard, expensive, and fraught with international politics. But after the supplies land in Afghanistan—especially in the south where most fighting occurs—logistics become easy (if still wildly expensive due to aircraft and fuel costs). Much of the supplies are parachuted to minor bases, or delivered by helicopter, or by trucks, which often are destroyed. The major bases have large runways. All of our ammunition and sensitive items are flown into Afghanistan. I once flew from Kuwait to Bagram on a C-17 (costing about $200m per) with a full load of 155mm ammunition.
We have created a virtual (if small) country within Afghanistan. Our virtual country is completely electrified except at tiny outposts. Most of the troops and contractors have running hot water, sewerage systems, and on some bases, pizza delivery and laundry service. There is WiFi, cell phone service, excellent gyms and many if not most troops who deploy to Afghanistan actually gain weight. (This is untrue for combat troops, who often skinny up.) There is FedEx and DHL at the major bases. Helicopters or trucks deliver mail to minor bases.
Most Afghans have no electricity. Their villages are dark. Our bases stand out like spaceships in the night. The Afghans have asked for years why we are able to quickly electrify our bases, but cannot electrify a village just outside the wire. They only expect these things because they were promised.
For years, we said we had to guard Kajaki Dam because the Taliban would destroy it. Which makes no sense. The Taliban controlled the dam for years and never destroyed it; their opium farms depend on it, and they hope to have electricity from it. The Taliban had eliminated opium before we came. They outlawed the dancing boys, and executed people for raping boys and girls. Yes, they were savage. Afghanistan is savage no matter who is in charge. President Karzai supported a law that allows a man to starve his wife if she refuses sex. Afghanistan still forces girls to marry men who rape them.
We also said the Taliban will destroy the electrical posts and lines, but this also is untrue. This brief combat video was shot by me, miles down from Kajaki, in the area of Sangin, in Helmand Province.
I had just walked under and photographed this power line in enemy-controlled terrain when we came under machine-gun fire. We say that the Taliban destroy the power lines, but it is a lie: we generate the electricity, and they charge people for it, and the Taliban like electricity. The Taliban are the power company executives; we work for them. If we really wanted to damage the Taliban, we would blow up Kajaki Dam. Instead, we guard and maintain it, and slave for the Taliban who uses the water to grown their opium.
There were plenty of power lines in the area that were completely controlled by the Taliban. There are only glimpses of power lines in the video, but it is a fact that the Taliban were not destroying them. The video was a composite from different firefights; during the ambush in the open, the two Javelin missiles were used in panic. One shot hit the dirt, which at first I thought must be a hidden position. But video would prove that it was just dirt in the wide open. The second hit the generator. We had no air support because there was a bigger fight going on nearby, and we could hear and see that they needed the Apaches and the rest more than we did.
After shattering some small rocks with the first Javelin (he had two missiles), the Soldier used the Javelin thermal (CLU) and locked his gates onto the heat source from a generator. He and the Soldiers in this image were covering the half I was with, while we ran out of the giant kill zone. The Javelin man launched a top-down attack, making an impressive fireball. Nobody knew what caused the fireball until the villagers (from the place where the gunfire was coming) came to base demanding payment for the generator.
The Taliban seem to think we are their retarded little toys; they shoot us, and blow us up, and then demand we pay for their stuff, which we do. Sometimes the Taliban seem to pity us. Rich, ignorant suckers. The power lines in this dispatch are safely under complete [Taliban] control.
During fighting, combat air support is seldom more than a few minutes away, and helicopter resupply is so certain in Kandahar and Helmand that even a brief contact from the enemy can result in massive return fire. In this brief firefight, we saw approximately a quarter of a million dollars’ worth (depending on which price you cite) of Javelin used to destroy some rocks and a generator. This cost does not include operator training, transport to Afghanistan, and then the helicopter flight to the outpost. More return fire could have been accomplished with RPGs for maybe a hundred bucks.
U.S. and British troops on foot missions sometimes unleash just to lighten the load. Americans are far worse at this than British. Courageous helicopter pilots—at risk of being shot down—will deliver “speedball” resupply on call, and the troops on the ground are easy to find. The pilots can put the speedball at your feet. American troops in Vietnam were notorious for doing the same.
This ain’t the jungle, and the Taliban are not bristling with surface-to-air missiles, and so the airspace is relatively safe, above small-arms range. Occasionally, the enemy uses surface-to-air missiles with success, and they have learned to reasonably match our night vision gear by using cheap cameras set to night mode. We use all sorts of IR beacons that the enemy can see with simple cameras.
For us, targets are easy to identify and mark by air or ground. We even have pricey GPS-guided mortars and artillery that can hit a parked car from miles away on the first strike. Using such gear would be far more difficult in a Louisiana bayou. If we were in a jungle or swamp, the apparent thousands of Javelin missiles that we and allies have fired in Afghanistan would often be impossible to bring to bear. The Javelins are great missiles, when they work, but we use them as fly swatters.
The taxpayers are generous and we waste that generosity self-righteously, with a massive sense of entitlement, which mostly is kept hidden with good PR, and willful blindness from those who foot the bills.
To dare spare any and all expense on the troops is seen as tantamount treason. Some years ago, there was a groundswell to supply troops with inferior body armor called Dragon Skin. The rally cry was that Dragon Skin was more expensive and therefore must be better, and that the military refused to buy it because it was more expensive.
The reality was that Dragon Skin was far more expensive, and far inferior to competitors. After trying Dragon Skin, which some people were buying for loved ones deployed, I refused to wear it in combat, and sold mine. To the Pentagon’s credit, the procurement system worked and the military did not cave to demands to buy the inferior Dragon Skin. The system is not totally broken. There really is some fine gear in use, but the failures are maddening, and this tendency to spare no expense is often used in commission of wanton waste.
In September 2011, I made video of a nearby U.S. strike using 12 GMLRS rockets. The Soldiers had to wait for well over a day—in a very dangerous area where two friendly fatalities (1 U.S., 1 ANA) occurred over two days. Finally came the rockets. About $2 million worth. Their actual cost would be far more if counting air transportation to Afghanistan, and other enormous associated costs, such as maintenance and specialized crews. While approval for the strike was on hold in Kabul, about 120 men waited as sitting ducks. (Many were Afghan Soldiers.)
The target: probably a few hundred dollars’ worth of ammonium nitrate. There were no enemy personnel on target. There were no civilians anywhere around. The target could have been hit within half an hour with a single bomb that already was under someone’s wing. Sometimes you get the impression that the choice of weapons—which was made in Kabul, hundreds of miles away—has nothing to do with the tactical realities.
On that particular mission – there was nothing special about it other than that it will be memorialized here – given that we came in and went out by helicopters, and took a U.S. fatality and one ANA killed, and the extreme costs of wasting Soldiers’ time in Afghanistan, it is not unrealistic to guess that that strike cost at least ten million dollars, or likely far more. There is no way to account for it, but we know that we were burning money at the bonfire of insanity, including a risky nighttime resupply halfway through by CH-47.
It has been estimated that it costs about $1 million to keep a U.S. Soldier in Afghanistan for one year. Let’s make a jagged stab at accounting for that mission, including some of the support, planning, and execution that went into it. Let’s argue that 400 people spent 10 days on it, or 4,000 man days. There was pre-mission planning that lasted weeks for some. Execution. And reset. So 10 days is safe. (Not including the many aircraft that supported us.) Most of the Soldiers involved with the mission did not actually go on it; they were support. That’s about $11 million, plus the $2 million for missiles, not to mention the aircraft, and the peanuts paid as death gratuity for the killed Soldier.
For what? A few hundred pounds of fertilizer. For every dollar we cost the enemy, we probably waste thousands.
It must cost at least a billion dollars to deploy an infantry battalion to Afghanistan for a year. It is hard to imagine it costing less. And this can never account for the casualties on both sides, the worn out and destroyed gear, and the suicide bomber and opium warehouse that has grown under our perceived wisdom. The Afghans, including in most of the worst places, have continuously demonstrated that they will welcome people and protect those who are helping, and they will resist those that they see as invaders. We would do the same.
Comments
And what about our reliance on contractors? About half of the people on the plane I was on to Iraq were contractors, and I'm not sure how much we'll be able to count on contractors in areas where we can't provide security like we do now.
Magnificent shot.
Other issues are related to the cultural desire to avoid US military and civilian casualties at all costs. This has led to force emasculation as combat leaders must ask permission from JAG lawyers before being allowed to act. Didn't we have the rear echelon guys directing the war in Vietnam?
Some daring brass should require a war game be fought where the blue forces have to leave all their battery powered behind and turn off the GPS based weapons and tools. I predict the results would not be pretty, but would be insightful for those willing to see our vulnerabilities . Basic skills have atrophied and must be rebuilt in our force.
Keep up the good work, Michael!
I wholeheartedly agree with the bulk of your message. We must get back to basics. We waste the vast majority of our training time on bullshit. I've complained about this many times, but superiors (BN and above) simply don't listen.
However, I must take issue with two statements you made.
1. The opium trade was smaller under the Taliban, but it continued, and they profited from it.
2. The Taliban executed others for raping women and boys, but they also executed the women, and raped plenty of women and boys themselves. In fact, a captured letter from Mullah Omar instructed Taliban members to "stop taking boys without beards into your quarters".
Like most religious fanatics, the Taliban have one set of rules for themselves, and a separate one for everyone else.
As for propaganda, many people here expect your next president to play "Iraqi card" once again with A-stan - declare end of mission and leave country in disarray, with all conflicts unsolved, new ones added, leaving PMCs here and there to protect interests. For Russia it would mean new bigger drug caravans from Middle Asia, unrests in republics with Muslim population, etc. Nothing good really.
We have history as a learned projector of the truth yet our politicians and commanding officers are locked up in a technology fugue and cannot see the forest for the trees
The idiocy continues as long as we think we are invincible
This awful trend Michael so well lays out, will continue until we purge our military ranks from top to bottom of the politicians and suck-up brown nosing officers and NCO's
The picture of the MRAP clearly goes over a culvert with what looks to be a 5 foot drop. Whether at COPs or HQs, I see those go out the front gate and come back all the time. Can you take it up crazy slopes? No. It has an indicator inside when you're exceeding the allowable slope. Factor in an inexperienced driver and it's obvious. In your example there's no way to know. To imply you'd rather be in a trike than an MRAP....well... right, ok.
Yes, their drug cultivation has to be higher because we're screwing them to the wall every corner they turn, making $$ hard to get. We bust their couriers, their labs, their money stashes, etc.
Scott's sorta along the same track I'm thinking. Your post really doesn't help much except the people who always moan and complain, but it does give comfort to the enemy. AQ TB, HiG, whomever, can print this out, say, "Look, this is a former Special Forces infidel who says your trike is better than their tank [they call our MRAPs tanks] and that they are fools. They can not win. Their equipment is worn out... yada yada yada." Now, the 13 yr old who's been watching them get their butt handed to them in a hat suddenly thinks, "Yeah! I will go strap on this IED belt and walk into a wedding party!! Allah willing, we will win"
Which sorta brings me to the end of my reply, and likely the end of reading the dispatches. Thank you Michael for the insightful postings back in 2004 on Iraq. Thanks for them around 2006-2008 as we needed to adapt COIN and bring Petraeus back.
It's been really enlightening until about a year ago. Good luck with future trips and maybe I'll start reading again if you start posting about the Mexican drug war (first hand reporting).
I realize this dispatch will hurt the feelings of people who are in denial of what has been happening in Afghanistan. If you think the Taliban are not aware that they are winning, you are tuned into a totally different war.
A couple of this: You mentioned that the MRAP "clearly goes over a culvert." There was no culvert there. Not sure where you see one in that image because it does not exist.
The more than day wasted for the GMLRS strike was during this mission.
You have often mentioned reading reports, and I believe that you were at KAF. I am curious about your experiences in Afghanistan.
What provinces have you been in, and when and for how long? How much time do you spend off of base out with the Afghans? Am curious if your experiences are based on reports, or on rummaging around in the villages and on the battlefields.
http://www.michaelyon-online.com/red-air-americas-medevac-failure.htm
It was during this mission: http://www.michaelyon-online.com/red-air-americas-medevac-failure.htm
You mention that Det cord and C4 isn't hard to find. I am starting to doubt that you go on a lot of combat missions. We had EOD out there, and I think if you paid attention to what is written, this clearly was a helicopter mission with 120 people. Combat units don't go on missions like that without EOD. (In my experience.) The EOD guys decided it was smarter to back off and do some other kind of strike. We did have two fatalities in two strikes in the vicinity.
I am not defeatist, just arrogant. I am still fully engaged in my profession as a writer. The military and the politicians have bungled the war. This war is in the 12th year, and we are doing worse now than ever.
Lies are expenses. Truths are investments. To pretend this will end well would be an expense I will not bear.
The technology mentality our military is following, along with civilian LE organizations is reminiscent of the intelligence lapses during the Carter administration. History is repeating itself.
When will we learn?
I only deal with professional gear, so I have no recommendations on beginner gear. I would say that some of the best smart phones can be good choices. I only use iPhone and pro gear, while my G11 sits idle.
On Lytro, I have kept an eye on it. The technology has not reached a point where I am will to try it, but when it gets there, it can be great.
We like our toys, and we do develop an excessive reliance upon them. And at times our toys aren't really all that great - the Sherman tank in WW2 was seriously inferior to German and British tanks of the era. The M1 carbine was good, but there's a reason we copied the German MG43 light machine gun.
And we've always had folks profiteering on war - my favorite story is the guy who sold a bunch of sickly horses to the Army of the Potomac, then got the contract to get rid of them for the Army, shipped them west and sold them to the Army again. That was in the 1860s.
We keep having to relearn that wars are won by men, not gear. And we'll have to relearn it again.
This is the difficult choice laid on every "observer and reporter"...whe n you see bad sh**, do you just report it along with the other reportable things...or do you become proactive and obsessive.
I'm all for anything that gets rid of the careerists and professional bureaucrats at the top wasting money and lives. I'm all for exposing the politicization of the armed forces and its costs borne by the sons and daughters of our country.
Just hope Michael doesn't become only the shrill voice chronic critic, but rather the instigator of change. That requires more than just electornic criticism in cyberspace.
Over the years of reading your critiques of the military, upon reading this article I can't help but think that, the military being what it is, that if they tried to improve upon their short comings, they would go way overboard in the opposite direction.
An organization is only as good as it's leadership. And you cannot always get good leaders where needed most. It would seem to me that it is hit and miss.
Ideas matter. And the ideas a culture accepts shape the battlefield as much as the strategies and tactics of its military elite.
I was in the Air Force/ECM during the tail end of Nam and we had many of the high tech toys you take for granted today. The simple fact we had such toys was classified. We had smart munitions, IR, and other technologies as far back as the mid 1960's which are still classified. They worked and worked well but when you take the field from the enemy and then the politicians and media make your forces give that field back to the enemy and force you to retake it again at great cost, what advantage does the technology provide? I have learned that, if you put the greatest technology in the hands of fools (politicians and lousy officers and soldiers, not the good ones) they will screw it up every time.
Would we be in trouble if we were to face Russia and China today? It depends on who our leaders and traitors are.
If properly trained and equiped, our soldiers can beat the best, if the idiots running the war let them. We need to focus on getting rid of the idiots so our troops can win wars.
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