"A New Kind of War Part 1" Richard Sale

Escalating violence, an acceleration of targeted killings, and deniable attacks by U.S. Special Forces on Taliban strong holds in Pakistan will all be the major results of the administration’s U.S. latest change in command  in Afghanistan, according to senior Pentagon officials.

   The very public May 11 firing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, replaced by Special Forces expert, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, portends a much bloodier phase of the war, these sources said.

     “McChrystal is an expert killer. That’s what the teams he heads are good at,” said former senior DIA official Pat Lang.

     “The idea is to put out the eyes of the insurgency using force,” a Pentagon official said.

     McChrystal, who headed U.S. Special Operations forces during the famous troop surge  in Iraq in the late spring of  2007, used a whole new array of methods to detect, locate and kill insurgent leaders which many claim was key to the success of the operation.

 

     As McChrystal, then the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC,  told The Washington Post last year, the surge involved waging “collaborate warfare “ using every available tool ranging from signals intercepts, human intelligence, double agents and other devices that allowed lightning quick and coordinated strikes on targets.

     In practice this meant an unprecedented blending of military and intelligence assets, Defense Dept. officials said. One key innovation was something called “fusion cells.”  As first reported by the Washington Post and confirmed by U.S. intelligence sources, these consist of small, highly mobile teams of Special Forces and intelligence specialists working together supported by forensic and computer specialists, mapping experts, along with political and tribal analysts.

     Some of the intelligence collection techniques involve using GPS devices to locate hostile bands, new space-based surveillance strategies, new methods of infiltrating enemy communications, and the use of tiny,  hand-launched  miniature drones like the Gnat which is packed in a tube that looks like a rolled-up umbrella. When when the drone is taken out, its spring-powered wings pop open, and it can be tossed into the air and can track targets up to three hours. Larger drones like the Predator can loiter for up to 14 hours.

    The sensors and cameras on the Gnat are operated from a lap top computer by a single operator and are so powerful that can relay data to major command centers and even the White House Situation Room in real time, according to former and serving military officials.

     Other collection devices include cameras mounted on the helmets of elite troops that relay intelligence such as papers found on dead insurgents to headquarter analysts who can analyze it with such a fast turn-around time, that, once interpreted, it can be used immediately to stage  additional raids, sometimes several in one night, sources said.

    Where in Iraq, the high-value targets were al-Qaida leaders, but in Afghanistan, the fusion cells will be focusing on Taliban leadership cadres in Afghanistan and in northwestern Pakistan, they said.

   As in Iraq, quick, lethal reaction to intelligence is everything, and from now on,  U.S. counterterror operations will be small, swift, mobile, based on precise information about targets, they said.

     A key factor in the firing of General David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, rested on the perception that the general “was wedded to the old fashioned big unit kind of warfare,” said one former DOD official.

    According to this official, McKiernan’s fate was sealed in early May when Secretary of Defense Bob Gates visited Camp Leatherneck, a large military base under construction in the Afghan province of Helmand on the Pakistan border.

   Mike O’Hanlon, a top military analyst at the Brookings Institution, disputes this, saying that locating the big logistics hub at Kandahar was inevitable and did not play a part in the removal of Mc Kiernan, adding that the decision had been made “some time before” Mullin’s visit.

     Several U.S. officials said that McKiernan’s preference for slow, cumbersome, large-unit sweeps, confined to Afghanistan’s few useable roads, allowed the insurgents to disperse without suffering damage. The elements of surprise that is key to fighting insurgents was never obtained, they said.

     These sources argue that Camp Leatherneck also reinforced the propensity for large groups of conventional forces to withdraw after an operation to a fixed strong point at night, a location which is kept under constant surveillance by the jihadis.

   But O’Hanlon argued that McKiernan had “an excellent understanding of counterinsurgency warfare,”  but that McKiernan’s “implementation” of the strategy was seen by superiors as “lacking in energy.” This perception sealed his fate, O’Hanlon said.

     Since the Afghan road system is so poor, any large unit movements are under constant surveillance by the enemy, and even in the case of patrols, U.S. troops use the same routes over and over, and quickly become a target for ambushes, these sources said.

        The strategy of McChrystal will be different.

     The traditional strategy of using big units to “Find ‘em, fix ‘em, finish ‘em,” searching for main force insurgent units to destroy, will be abandoned since it ignores small bands of jihais in key areas , Pentagon officials said.     

      Under the new strategy, the chief aim will be to prevent the Taliban infiltration of neighborhoods in Afghanistan’s major cities, with U.S. forces working in close support with Afghan security forces, they said.

     In the case of rural areas regarded as strategically valuable, a former CIA official said: “What are needed are swift envelopments of a well-mapped sector – a smothering of the sector that allows no escape for the jihadis.”

      To gain that information, Coalition forces are trying to prepare an organizational chart of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, U.S. intelligence officials said.

     “We need to know exactly who these  bastards are and their weak points,” said one official.

     But the chief burden of the new U.S. mission will fall on the Afghan police. According to U.S. Institute of Peace analyst, Alexander Thier, even with 60,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, there will not be sufficient forces to do “an outreach” into remote rural areas.

     Several U. S. sources said that the chief aim of U.S. operations will be to ensure the safety of the Afghan population, and this means having U.S. units embedded with Afghan security forces the neighborhoods of the major towns.

   There will also be more initiative in U.S. tactics instead of merely reacting to enemy raids and ambushes, U.S. officials said.

     A retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, writing in the Small Wars Journal, stated recently that where past practice in Iraq had been to take State Dept. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) and post them to areas recaptured from insurgents, the new policy should be to establish such teams in areas still free of the Taliban and before the insurgents can gain a foothold in them. Anderson is currently serving with an embedded PRT in Iraq.

     Questioned about Anderson’s suggestion, a former senior DOD official said, “We have all sorts of initiatives under consideration.”

 

By Richard Sale, Middle East Times Intelligence Correspondent

 

Comments

[Charles I]

". . the new policy should be to establish such teams in areas still free of the Taliban and before the insurgents can gain a foothold in them."

Man, if that's state of the art thinking after 7, 8 years of this, and now we're broke to boot, it was over along time ago.

Still free. . . has a fin de siecle ring to it

alnval, my country mucking around in a foreign country like that, I'd like to live in a country where its your Duty to discuss these oft harebrained schemes in public.

[Patrick Lang]

all

Duty -

"Stern daughter of the voice of God." Wordsworth

"The sublimest word in the English language." Robert Lee

[johnf]

Apologies for mentioning the dirty word oil but Iran and Pakistan have just signed up for a gas pipeline deal which, this Asia Times article argues, completely alters the strategic balance in Central Asia and proves a victory for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization view of the world:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE29Df02.html

[Tyler]

Colonel Lang,

What professionals are you talking about that are trained like SWAT teams? I'm honestly curious, and wondering if you could expand on that comment.

[Patrick Lang]

Tyler

The whole DA CT SOF ground force. pl

[Tyler]

Colonel Lang,

Ah. Well, that's certainly an understatement of sorts, but fitting.

[Alba Etie]

What impact will the current Pakistani military operation have -that apparently has driven the Taleban out of the Swat valley -including just today Mingora ,
Could one ray of hope be that the ISSI and the current Pakistan leadership actually views the Taleban as a larger threat then the Indians?
And what was the purpose of the recent meeting of the leaders of Pakistan, Afgahnistan and Iran ? Could these three countries have decided to confront alQaida & the Taleban in a regional cohesive manner ? Is it worth considering that the Iranians (who almost went to war with the Taleban at least twice in the late nineties) might actually be willing to help the US/Nato efforts to defeat the jihadis ?
And where do the Chinese and the Russians figure into this regional equation ?It would appear to be self evident that it is no country's interest to allow the Taleban/jihadis to overthrow the government of either Afghanistan or Pakistan .
Are we possibly seeing an emerging coalition of regional action against the Taleban and other extremist ?
Is it not possible that a regional security approach focued on defeating the extremist could somehow be fashioned ?

[curious]

video clip. Mingora. Taliban tried to hold this town.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8075882.stm

http://pakobserver.net/200905/31/news/topstories01.asp

Peshawar/Islamabad—The security forces on Saturday gained full control of Mingora , the headquarters of Swat which was occupied by the insurgents, killing more than two dozens of militants including their two commanders.

As the operation was extended to picturesque hill station Kalam and Guli Bagh in the outskirts of Mingora, the security forces and the militants were reportedly locked in fierce fighting near Kalam where at least one soldier embraced Shahadat taking the death toll of the soldiers killed during the ongoing operation to 81. 250 men in uniform sustained injuries during action against the insurgents challenging the government writ in the region. This was confirmed by the DG ISPR who also said 1217 insurgents were killed so far and around 90 others arrested.

[opit]

Is there a Mission Plan and Objective yet ?
You've been appropriately caustic in the past about any 'plan' purporting to 'rebuild' Afghanistan. That won't be happening : no problem, right ? Time line is fun too : how many commenters have heard of the British Army loss of 12,000 in the Khyber Pass...in 1835 ? That makes a '100 year war' sound like definite understatement.
I'm afraid I tag the 'anti-drug' policy as simple Air Amerika which destroys the pitiable local economic base and causes death by starvation as surely as killing the buffalo did for the Plains Indians...and do compare strategies.
The 'Post-Saddam Iraq' wargame 'Desert Crossing' still gives the the best compliance with the arc of U.S. activities in support of openly stated PNAC policies and objectives. There is no mystery here : just chronic organized obfuscation of the planned depriving Russia of oil with which to defend herself...an idea with which she is well acquainted.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/index.htm