The Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency: Part One - The Afghan Army

The Marine Corps University Counterinsurgency Leadership In Afghanistan, Iraq and Beyond: The Art of Battalion Command in Counterinsurgency transcript (PDF) is so good, I have decided to post the entire thing in four installments. I believe there are important insights in these discussions not only for Afghanistan, but in the context of US Navy discussions as well. The participants were:

Bing West, Correspondent, The Atlantic
Col. Dale Alford, Institute for Defense Analyses, USMC
Col. William M. Jurney, US Joint Forces Command, USMC
Col. David Furness, Marine Corps Liaison Office, US House of Representatives

Held on Wednesday, September 23, 2024 at 10:30 at the National Press Club, Washington DC, part one is the presentation by Bing West.

We were going to, in this panel, move from the general to the very particulars. You consider this the panel that deals with fighting in the trenches, the tackling and blocking that happens upfront in the line. And I was asked basically if I would establish the context for the three battalion commanders.

Dave had one-one. But, you know, what you received about these gentlemen really, really didn’t tell you the reason that they’re here. I mean, Bill Jurney, when we were in Ramadi, a lot of people, including, me didn’t think you could get that place under control, and Bill Jurney was the battalion commander who did it.

And Dale Alford, of course, is a legend because Dale went out to Al-Qa’im, 250 miles from Baghdad, and that place on the Syrian border was just totally out of control and with one battalion he established not only control out there but managed to work with the tribes so that after he left it continued to be quiet. And everyone felt that on the Syrian border that just couldn’t be done.

And so you do have the opportunity this morning or listening to a few people whose credentials are just absolutely remarkable.

Concerning the context, I’ve been to Afghanistan four times, I’d like to just focus it on that and I was there in April and May and again in June and July and I was on about 40 combat patrols up north and down south and so I’ll just tell you what really concerns me.

It’s very, very simple - that every valley has a mountain. And all the mountains are controlled by the Taliban and the watchers are everywhere. No American or Afghan patrol leaves the wire without being watched and reported on the whole way. And I’ll tell you, H.R., that really concerns me because it indicates that there’s a substrata of that society that we’re dealing with, and if everywhere you go they’re watching you all the time, this is a big, big problem.

May I have the next slide, please? Now, the way in which we had been - next slide, please - the way in which - this is the Korengal Valley but this could be anywhere in Afghanistan.

The way in which all the firefights had been taking place up until the last couple of months was very simple. We were fighting apaches who remained very, very hidden. You’d never get a distinct target and generally the ranges were 400 to 600 meters. And this is in the Korengal and we’re firing at targets that were firing at us 600 meters away but you had to go down a valley and up the other side so there’s no way you could close with them. So we automatically were using air strikes.

And H.R. was talking about company commanders having these indirect fires at their disposal. Yes, every single patrol has it, but we now have a new tactical directive that says, knock off using most of it because you’re also killing civilians. And that leads to a very big problem about what takes its place.

And there’s another element about Afghanistan that concerned me greatly. May I have the next slide, please? Look at this photo. This is Ganjgal where the four Marines and the ETT were killed last week and eight Afghan soldiers. I’ve been in Ganjgal a couple of times. The 1st of 32nd is there.

And we took this picture because they said, look behind us. And as you’re moving along in an MRAP to go to this one small hamlet in a ravine and next to the mountains, the kids were coming out right behind us and putting the rocks behind us in order to trap us, just like that. We sat down. We had shurahs with these people in Ganjgal. We did everything according to the book that you’re supposed to do for counterinsurgency for the last two years and they betrayed the Marines and the Afghan soldiers when they went into that village and that’s why they killed them all.

So there are some hearts and minds that you’re just not going to win. The politics of each valley differ but every single battle space owner, every single battalion commander that we now have in Afghanistan, could come to this meeting, give you a map of his area, and take a red line and show you the areas where he cannot go without getting into a firefight.

And to show you what’s happened in the firefights and the biggest concern I have about finishing them - will you show this firefight, please? This is a typical firefight. This is down south.

(Begin video segment.)

MR. WEST: This is Bing West with the Afghan Army, British advisors and United States Marines in southern Afghanistan.

MR. : So you start suppressing all the - (inaudible) - across a certain ground.

MR. : You can hear the incoming.

MR. WEST (?): See, those were the PKM rounds, the machine gun rounds that hit just above our heads.

(End video segment.)

MR. WEST: Stop. If you can get it going, once you try to get it going again. But the point about this firefight was it was from one compound to the next - why don’t you replay it and see if it will just start - one compound to the next. They were firing RPGs. It was an open field. You couldn’t determine whether there were women or children in that compound, therefore you were stuck. You had one or two options. You either withdrew or you went across the open field. We withdrew.

And the dilemma that we’re going to be facing - may I have the next slide please if that doesn’t work? The dilemma that we’re going to be facing in the future is that the more we have constrained our indirect fires, which has been the principal way in which we were doing this, you leave the question, or two big questions dangling out there at the battalion level: How do you finish the firefights?

Right now we’re not finishing firefights. So we’re not doing damage basically to the enemy. The enemy isn’t doing damage to us because we have our armor. But we have now an attrition warfare. We don’t have mobility warfare. The Taliban run circles around us because they’re not wearing heavy armor. They’re in much better shape, incredible shape. And as a result, they hold the initiative. They decide when to initiate a firefight. They decide when to stop the firefight. And we react to them and we’re not finishing the firefights. So we’re not killing the enemy.

Now, are we arresting the enemy? Excuse me. I used to say detain or something. Now we say “arrest.” No. The Afghans arrest practically no one. And the average number of arrests for an American battalion is one person every two months.

So we’re not killing them and we’re not arresting them. And the blocking and tackling them that are fundamentally essential are right now really lacking.

So we can put in more troops, but my concern about this is, if we don’t find a way of finishing these fights, we could be having this conversation a year to two years from now and the Taliban would still be intact.

And that basically leads to the other issue which is where are we going? Basically, if we’re managing what we measure, we have some adjusting to do in what it is we think we’re going to be doing in Afghanistan.

And particularly - may I have the next slide, please? The question of what is our theory of victory. It seems to me if you read the assessment that I think that H.R. and others worked on - you read the assessment that McChrystal came out with the other days and you read it very careful, its theory of victory is not victory - it’s transition.

And when you look for how do we transition, it becomes a little bit fuzzy. And if transition is the name of the game, then the very best paper I’ve ever seen on it was written by actually Maj. Gen. Bob Neller when he was an obscure brigadier general out in Okinawa or something and had time to work it. It’s the best single paper that I’ve ever seen about how you transition.

But the problem we now have with the Afghan Army is very simple. We build it in our image. They’re all wearing armor. They’re all wearing helmets. They are no more mobile than we are. When you get into the firefight, they immediately turn to the advisor because only the advisor is permitted to call in the indirect fires. The minute you call in the indirect fires, you’re positioning the troops, you become the leader in the combat.

The Afghan leaders are absolutely the key to the success, but Mark Moyar’s - and that’s a good book he wrote - Mark has this fascinating section in the book where he interviewed something like 250 advisors. And they estimated that 65 percent of all Afghan battalions have poor leaders. And yet, our advisors have about zero effect on promotions in the Afghan system. So here I go.

I know that Pete Mansoor said, you know, Bing’s for these joint promotion boards but Gen. Petraeus had another way of doing it. I think, Pete, we’re out of time for being gentile in Afghanistan, and if we’re going to make a difference, I think we have to get more control over who’s in charge in the Afghan army.