The Army's study of what happened in the Wanat battle a year ago in eastern Afghanistan is even harder on senior U.S. military commanders than I was in my series on it back in February, saying that they didn't understand counterinsurgency doctrine and also that some of their statements about the fight were misleading at best.
The report, which is still in draft form, contradicts a few aspects of the accounts provided by some of the senior officers involved, implicitly raising integrity questions. That's especially significant because two officials at Fort Leavenworth have told me that the Army inspector general's office is investigating how the Wanat incident was reported and reviewed. I also hear that congressional interest in the situation is growing.
The report, which has not been released and was written for the Army's Combat Studies Institute by military historian Douglas Cubbison, finds multiple failures by the battalion and brigade commanders involved...
... The report also is in awe of the bravery and persistence of the 42 soldiers and 3 Marines who fought at Wanat, as I am. I knew that some continued to fight after being hit several times. But I didn't know that one continued to pass ammunition even when he was mortally wounded.
I also think the Army deserves praise for having the honesty to have this report done. I am told that the final version will be released soon. Let's hope it isn't thrown out the back door at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon in August.
Much more at Best Defense.
Comments
j2Hess:
You miss my point which was that anybody that has done Coin, and is thoughtful and reflective and can think otherwise about things, knows that an outfit doing all the right things in classic counterinsurgency operations like establishing governance, assisting in the building of infrastructure, providing security through dispersed operations using cops, etc, etc, can still not have the effect that you want of bringing the population to the government.
I am not hostile to Coin, I am hostile to the religion that has been built around it that accepts a half-baked theory in order to link causes to effects. Sadly, there is nothing new here and history has shown that the many classic Coin campaigns that people think were won by better application of hearts and minds methods--the British in Malaya, the French in Morocco under Layautey--were actually won by brute force and in the case of Malaya combined with the resettlement of populations. In the case of the French in Morocco under Layautey the notion of "progressive penetration" and positive development for the betterment of the people became tropes that Layautey and others used to assuage a very volatile political situation at home. His conquest of Morocco in the early 1900s was essentially accomplished by the application of the hard hand of war. In this regard see some of Douglas Porch's excellent histories on French imperial wars.
As to your other point about being "shallow,"well, I do hope that you were not applying that word directly to me in my conduct of Coin in West Baghdad in 2006. In that I was just "shallowly" trying to be nice to people because I was really, as the Coindinistas love to accuse, hunkered down on a local Fob being comfortable and eating ice cream. No, wrong; in fact I had a man killed, shot in the head dead by a sniper, while his patrol was providing security to workers picking up garbage off of the street. You see, contrary to the false image that writers like Tom Ricks presents, we actually did get and understood classic population centric counterinsurgency and were working hard to reopen shops and businesses on the main street in Ameriyah to improve the people's lives to bring them closer to their government. Shallow we were not; committed to doing our duty we were. None of the false information that Tom Ricks has said about my unit will change that basic fact.
Hi j2hess:
Based on what I've gathered from friends who were in the valley at the time/shortly after (as in QRF) and the assessments of some AWG types, it was simply a premature, top-down mandated push into a hostile area where we could not project enough power to even secure our own forces. In that way, yes, it <i>is</i> different from some other valleys in that neck of the woods, but not so different from many, many others.