The Army's official report on the July battle in Afghanistan that killed nine paratroops and wounded 27 others is filled with details of heroism, desperation and a calculated risk gone wrong.

It begins with the decision to close down an "extremely vulnerable" combat outpost nearby and relocate to Wanat, a move discussed by the brigade for more than a year.

Ten months of coordination with Afghan officials about the land allowed militants to plan an attack "that only required refinement once the land was occupied."

On July 9, in the early morning darkness, the US troops and 24 Afghan paratroops established the vehicle patrol base.

Each day, locals warned the US troops of an impending attack.

"There was intelligence an attack would occur," the report found, "but this was to be expected for the Waygal District."

Troops expected a "probing attack" of around 20 militants. Instead, at around 4:20 a.m., the force of 200 enemy launched a complex, well-organized attack that first targeted the troops' heavy weapons.

More at Stars and Stripes.

CJTF-101 Report Dated 13 August 2008 - Part 1

CJTF-101 Report Dated 13 August 2008 - Part 2

Since 1922, Military Review has provided a forum for the open exchange of ideas on military affairs. Subsequently, publications have proliferated throughout the Army education system that specialize either in tactical issues associated with particular Branches or on strategic issues at the Senior Service School level. Bridging these two levels of intellectual inquiry, Military Review focuses on research and analysis of the concepts, doctrine and principles of warfighting between the tactical and operational levels of war.

Military Review is a refereed journal that provides a forum for original thought and debate on the art and science of land warfare and other issues of current interest to the US Army and the Department of Defense. Military Review also supports the education, training, doctrine development and integration missions of the Combined Arms Center (CAC), Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Military Review is printed bimonthly in English, Spanish and Portuguese and is distributed to readers in more than 100 countries. It is also printed in Arabic on a quarterly basis. Widely quoted and reprinted throughout the world, it is a readily available reference at most military and civilian university libraries and research agencies.

Here is the November - December 2008 lineup:

Enable from Overwatch: MNF-Iraq by General Raymond T. Odierno, U.S. Army

The MNF-Iraq commander's operating guidance emphasizes "how we think," "how we operate," and "who we are."

The Strategy of Protracted People's War: Uganda by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni, President of the Republic of Uganda

President Museveni presents thoughts and observations on the future of Africa and the moral factor in revolutionary warfare.

Rethinking IO: Complex Operations in the Information Age by Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, U.S. Army Retired

The Army lacks dexterity with war's moral domain. Today's highly complex conflicts demand recovering a holistic approach.

Irregular Warfare Information Operations: Understanding the Role of People, Capabilities, and Effects by Lieutenant Colonel Norman E. Emery, U.S. Army

Current operating environments require balancing IO efforts against the enemy with those efforts intended to influence populations.

Georgia: The War Russia Lost by Stephen J. Blank, Ph.D.

The Strategic Studies Institute's expert on the Soviet bloc and the post-Soviet world examines the ramifications of Russia's recent posturing.

China's Electronic Long-Range Reconnaissance by Lieutenant Colonel Timothy L. Thomas, U.S. Army Retired

China's ongoing use of "patriotic hackers" may represent electronic reconnaissance for putting cyber-war theory into practice.

On Metaphors We are Led By by Colonel Christopher R. Paparone, Ph.D., U.S. Army Retired

Caring for mild traumatic brain injury is challenging for the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Sports medicine's "best practices" can revolutionize treatment of such injuries for Soldiers.

Sociocultural Expertise and the Military: Beyond the Controversy by Pauline Kusiak, Ph.D.

While using academics for military ethnographic analysis may be controversial, it can foster better security.

Revisiting Modern Warfare: Counterinsurgency in the Mada'in Qadaby by Lieutenant Colonel David G. Fivecoat, U.S. Army, and Captain Aaron T. Schwengler, U.S. Army

French Colonel Roger Trinquier's 1964 book Modern Warfare has relevant lessons for 21st-century counterinsurgency.

How Jesse James, the Telegraph, and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 Can Help the Army Win the War on Terrorism by Peter E. Kunkel, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management and Comptroller)

History teaches that a cashless battlefield can translate into less violence and a quicker restoration of stability.

Planning Full Spectrum Operations: Implications of FM 3-0 on Planning Doctrine by Major Glenn A. Henke, U.S. Army

Phasing military operations has proven to be a defunct heuristic for effectively meshing logical lines of operations in COIN.

Relooking Unit Cohesion: A Sensemaking Approach by Major Geoff van Epps, U.S. Army

With the days of Army COHORT units more than two decades past, cohesion has become an afterthought.

Reconstruction: A Damaging Fantasy? by Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University

If we cannot put our own house in order, is it realistic to think we can do it for another country, especially when that country's culture is significantly different?

Book Reviews

Contemporary readings for the professional.

The rumor started to spread last week. if Sen. Barack Obama won the presidential election, Michele Flournoy would resign from the Center for a New American Security Thursday following the election. Friday at the latest.

It's not difficult to understand why the talk circulated. Flournoy boasts an enviable resume. A veteran of the Clinton Pentagon, she worked on counter-proliferation issues before playing a large role in shaping the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, an overview of defense strategy and its implementation.

After leaving government service, Flournoy took a high-profile job at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a prominent Washington policy organization, before co-founding the Center for a New American Security, an increasingly influential defense think tank, in 2007.

It's not just Flournoy. CNAS, as it's known, is widely considered a likely feeder for the Obama Pentagon, though the organization disputes this — preferring to bill itself as nonpartisan. What CNAS does not dispute is that, over the course of the past two years — overnight, in Washington terms — it has emerged as an energetic center for studying contemporary defense issues, including Iraq, counterinsurgency and the national-security effects of climate change.

More at The Washington Independent.

Center for a New American Security

The instructor called up the slide on an gigantic screen, so that the nearly 200 students in the lecture hall could see. The lesson was about the effect of leadership on the durability of insurgencies. One example was Al Qaeda. The slide asked: "If UBL" - meaning Osama bin Laden - "dies, is the insurgency dead?" The next example was the American Revolution. "If George Washington dies, is the revolution dead?"

The instructor, Mark Ulrich, explained that his efforts were geared toward getting the class to think about insurgencies in objective and clinical terms. "Again: clinical!" Ulrich practically yelled just before putting the slides on the projector. "Think clinical. Don't think 'terrorism-bad.' That whole thing, 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter,' that's not clinical. That's emotional."

If this were any other academic setting - a New England liberal arts college, for example - and a tweedy professor tacitly compared bin Laden to George Washington, no matter how loosely, he would find himself targeted by Fox News for the sin of moral equivalence. But Ulrich is largely inoculated against such charges. He's an Army lieutenant colonel and Iraq veteran assigned to the joint Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.

This center, now nearly two-years old, was developed to embed the lessons of counterinsurgency warfare into the architecture of a military that, at senior levels, still appears resistant to such methods of fighting. Many senior staff fear these tactics would mean bogging the country down in bloody conflicts and eroding traditional military skills.

Yet Ulrich and the Counterinsurgency Center are dedicated to ensuring that the military doesn't repeat the mistakes of the post-Vietnam era, when the military purged counterinsurgency from its institutional memory on the mistaken assumption that such a move would prevent U.S. involvement in such conflicts. Instead, this move guaranteed that the military would have to reinvent the wheel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Approximately 160 officers and enlisted men from around the US military, along with visiting soldiers from Canada and Australia, attended the 2008 Counterinsurgency Leaders' Workshop this week, at Ft. Leavenworth, to hear Ulrich, the main lecturer, better explain the mission and the enemy many of them have already fought. The conference offered a window into the ways in which the military is changing to absorb counterinsurgency - and, in some ways, how it is resisting that change.

Much more at The Washington Independent.

The election of Barack Obama will trigger a significant realignment of US national-security priorities, with Afghanistan and Pakistan gaining in prominence as resources are redirected from Iraq.

US policy in the two regions has been shaped by the Bush administration's decision to commit the bulk of the nation's military and financial resources to Iraq, where the ouster of Saddam Hussein set off a prolonged civil war, rather than to Afghanistan. The focus on Iraq left the Afghanistan mission chronically short of troops and money.

The incoming Obama administration sees the challenges differently. Aides said Mr. Obama is likely to deploy tens of thousands of additional US troops to Afghanistan, where security conditions have worsened markedly in recent months and attacks by the Taliban and others have risen. They said Mr. Obama also would devote more attention to neighboring Pakistan, whose support is seen as crucial to defeating the Taliban and al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan.

With security conditions in Iraq continuing to improve, the Pentagon announced Wednesday that a combat brigade of about 4,000 troops from the 101st Airborne Division would leave Iraq six weeks sooner than planned. Several more brigades are expected to leave by next summer.

Those moves free up more troops for use in Afghanistan.

More at The Wall Street Journal.

Have some ideas or opinions on this issue? If yes, then head on over to Soldiers in the Blogosphere and share them with Major Bruhl.

Afghanistan's government has stepped up efforts to win the cooperation of tribal leaders to try to build security at the village level and fend off the Taliban. The strategy has the backing of coalition forces and is similar to a successful effort in Iraq, where powerful tribal leaders turned on al-Qaeda.

"We're coming back to recognize tribal leadership, to empower and acknowledge them as leaders within their communities," said US Army Brig. Gen. Michael Tucker, deputy commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

In Iraq, the tribal movement started in Anbar province, west of Baghdad, and eventually spread throughout the country. It helped isolate al-Qaeda from the local population.

"We need to leverage the tribal system in Afghanistan as was done in Iraq," said US Gen. David McKiernan, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan...

... "The Taliban are anti-tribal," ... "They are trying to destroy the tribal structures. ... This gives the Pakistani and Afghani governments a crowbar" to drive a wedge between the Taliban and the general population.

More at USA Today.

A social scientist in the Army's controversial Human Terrain program was en route to Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas after being set on fire in and apparent Taliban attack in Afghanistan. It's the third time in five months that a Human Terrain Team member has been killed or seriously wounded.

Paula Lloyd was interviewing locals in the southern village of Maywand on Tuesday as part of her duties in a Human Terrain Team, which embeds civilian cultural experts into U.S. combat units. She approached a man carrying a fuel jug and they began talking about the price of gas. Suddenly, the man doused Lloyd in a flammable liquid and set her on fire. She suffered second- and third-degree burns over 60 percent of her body, a Human Terrain source told Danger Room.

The injuries could have been worse. Lloyd's teammate immediately threw her into a nearby water source to douse the flames, then Lloyd was sped to a nearby medical facility. Fortunately, the first doctor to treat her was a U.S. Army burn specialist. After being stabilized, Lloyd was evacuated to the military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and is now en route to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Lloyd is in "stable, but guarded condition," the source said.

The Taliban took credit for the attack on their website. The Taliban has a long history of setting women on fire as a way of punishing them for perceived immodesty.

More at Danger Room and Reuters. Our best wishes to Paula and prayers for a speedy and full recovery and our heartfelt thanks for her service to our Nation and humankind.

SWJ will provide updates as more information becomes available.

HTS Members Killed in the Line of Duty:

Michael Bhatia, a social scientist team member assigned to the Afghanistan Human Terrain Team (HTT) AF1, in support of Task Force Currahee based at FOB Salerno, Khowst Province, was killed on 7 May 2008 when the Humvee he was riding in was struck by an IED. Michael was traveling in a convoy of four vehicles, which were en route to a remote sector of Khowst province. For many years, this part of Khowst had been plagued by a violent inter-tribal conflict concerning land rights. Michael had identified this tribal dispute as a research priority, and was excited to finally be able to visit this area. This trip was the brigade's initial mission into the area, and it was their intention to initiate a negotiation process between the tribes.

Nicole Suveges, a social scientist team member assigned to the Iraq Human Terrain Team (HTT) IZ3, in support of 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division based at FOB Prosperity, Baghdad, Iraq, was killed on 24 June 2008 when a bomb exploded at the District Council building in southern Sadr City where she was attending a meeting of the District Advisory Council, which was scheduled to elect a new chairman. Nicole had almost completed a PhD in political science at Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation was titled "Markets & Mullahs: Global Networks, Transnational Ideas and the Deep Play of Political Culture." Formerly, she served in Sarajevo as an Army Reservist in support of SFOR/NATO. For the past two years, Nicole had worked in Iraq, initially as a project lead for polling and later as a subject matter expert for Multinational Corps Iraq (MNCI).

Update:

Pray for Paula Lloyd - Christopher Albon, War and Health

Our Thoughts are with Paula Lloyd and Her Family - Drew Conway, ZIA

Clare Lockhart is the director of the Institute for State Effectiveness and co-author, with Ashraf Ghani, of Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World. She spent some three years on the ground in Afghanistan and continues to work to revitalize U.S. strategy in that country. This Slate article is an excellent example of learning from the past about the part of counterinsurgency most of us understand least well: the economic and governance lines of operation.

Both candidates for the U.S. presidency pledged to make Afghanistan a top priority. The war there now tops the news on a daily basis with tales of the devastating hardships of the Afghan people and the deaths of Afghans and NATO soldiers. The untold story is that Afghanistan was well on its way to stability in 2004. It is essential that President Obama understands why the nation slipped into chaos. The challenge now is to win the peace...

Learning From Experience at Slate.

This book describes the work of strategic corporals and their teams in two violent and devastated cities in the developing world: Baidoa in Somalia in 1993, and Dili in East Timor in 1999. Both cities had been destroyed by conflict and their citizens traumatised and displaced. In each case, the United Nations endorsed the deployment of international troops to take control. In Baidoa, Australian troops operated under American command to strict defensive ROE, seeking to protect the distribution of humanitarian aid. In Dili, under Australian command and empowered by a UN mandate, Australian troops had the freedom to take whatever measures were required to stabilise the situation, including the use of lethal force...

... In both situations—in Baidoa in 1993 and in Dili and along the East Timor--West Timor border in 1999--2000—junior leaders and small teams had to make decisions carefully with higher level consequences in mind. The ROE were essential decision-making tools, but also effectively increased the pressure on the soldiers to make the right decision when they anticipated danger or were faced with an immediate threat. There are numerous anecdotes illustrating the challenges they faced, many of which remain untold. Those that were recounted have been included in this book, remarkable stories that bespeak the danger and isolation in which many of the most critical decisions were made by young soldiers. The narrative adds context to these decisions and necessarily reflects on their aftermath, consequences and, most critically, the lessons they contain.

The World Looking Over Their Shoulders: Australian Strategic Corporals on Operations in Somalia and East Timor