I love the book, not least because it reiterates the Secretary of Defense view that the military cannot win this Long War alone.
What this book does NOT address is the raw fact that we are our own worst enemy, and that as long as we make policy based on delusional fantasies combined with rapid profiteering mandates from Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, as long as we lack a strategic analytic model, and as long as we are completely opposed to actually creating a prosperous world at peace, then the USA is destined for self-immolation.
HOWEVER, if you recognize as I do that those in power are completely divorced from reality, having become “like morons” as Daniel Ellsberg lectured Henry Kissinger in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and that both Congress and the White House consist of good people trapped in a bad system that robs each and every one of them of their integrity, then no happy ending is possible.
The power and common sense of the Average American (see the book by that title, I am out of authorized links) can still be brought to bear, but first we have to stop this nonsense of thinking that if we only have the right strategy, we can evil and force not just the emerging powers, but Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo, Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Turkey into their “role” as playthings of the American Empire.
Please. We have gone from a village idiot to a major domo that gives good theater, and books like this are still being written? Get a grip!
Phi Beta Iota, the new honour society committed to public intelligence in the public interest, is now publishing the free online Journal of Public Intelligence. There are no costs or qualifications save one: have a brain and use it in the public interest.
Antiwar.com
July 21, 2009 by Kelley B. Vlahos Listen closely and you can hear the slow release of hot air. There’s a leak somewhere, and it appears to be coming from the giant red, white, and blue balloon set aloft some months ago by the counterinsurgency experts who convinced everyone in Washington that Afghanistan was one “graveyard of empires” that could be resurrected for the good of the world.
In fact, anxiety over the latest major U.S. offensive in Afghanistan is increasing among military officials and policymakers every day, sources tell us. News reports coming in from Helmand province and repeated public complaints from American and British leaders bear that out.
And the story is this: in order for so-called “population centric” counterinsurgency to work in a place as vast and geographically unrelenting as Afghanistan, there must be a lot of counterinsurgents (more than 600,000, according to the current Army counterinsurgency manual). Right now, there is a lid on the number of coalition forces approved for the mission, and worse, there are pathetically few Afghan troops and police available to do the most important work, which is to collaborate with the foreign forces to fight the Taliban and successfully hold areas on behalf of the Afghan government over the long term.
Even as 10,000 Marines pushed into the Hindu Kush bearing the talisman of David Petraeus and his patented COIN doctrine this month, it was clear to top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal that something was amiss.
“The key to this is Afghan responsibility to the fight,” he told the New York Times on July 15. “As a team we are better.”
His anonymous lieutenants were much blunter. “There are not enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police for our forces to partner with in operations … and that gap will exist into the coming years even with the planned growth already budgeted for,” an unnamed U.S. military official told the Washington Post four days earlier.
Click on photo above for complete story. See also our reviews of:
Over-Hyped by Marketing, Excellent for Students of SOF, October 15, 2008
This book has been very heavily over-sold by the publisher and will disappoint those who are expecting something other than a professional account of a professional mission with all its warts.
This is a very fine first person account with ample detail that I for one found very rewarding and worthy of both my time and money (the book is very reasonably priced). The reader will benefit from first reading the reviews of the books I list at the end–one would never know from this account that Rumsfeld gave the Pakistani's an air corridor to evacuate 3000 Taliban overnight from Tora Bora, that the Navy was certain they killed Bin Laden, or that General Franks refused to put a battalion of Rangers on the back door (the author does tell us of his understanding that President Bush personally ruled that the back door belonged to the “trusted” Pakistanis).
The author tries hard to be nice to intelligence, but his true bottom line is captured in his description of what they had for him:
1) It's winter in Afghanistan
2) Bin Laden can ride a horse
We all know they had more than that–even with a US Senator blowing the fact that we were listening to Bin Laden's cell phones and satellite phones–but the reality is that CIA could meet with the warlords but did not have actual people within the tribes and on the ground as the Pakistani ISI did.
The author also makes clear that it was just as hard to figure out the friendly situation as it was the enemy situation. From where I sit, “total battlefield awareness” is a pipe dream–a fraud–and it's time we started refocusing on humans that can live up to the Gunny Poole “Tiger's Way.”
Here I my notes, ending with my conclusions and ten books I recommend in partnership with this one.
Early on the role of snipers, and the possible uses of snipers if we could get bureaucrats and politicians out of the way, impress me.
Small teams with a forward air controller that can go deep and stay for days impress me, very much. Unfortunately, we don't field them often enough (I only have read of use in Colombia, not generally, but SOF operates in over 150 countries so who knows).
Author reinforces the concept of Irregular Warfare as bottom-up thinking in which every person has a say, but takes pains to distinguish this from leadership, with the self-effacing comment that the leaders will decide after the enlisted personnel tell the leaders what they need to know.
Early on he laments to misplacing of the Special Operations “truths,” the first one being “Humans are more important than hardware.” Today privates are being selected for special operations right out of boot camp, and between private military contractors being allowed to loot the public treasury of both money and skilled manpower, and the complete dismissal of all standards, one can sense the author's thoughts between the lines: DELTA is the last vestige of “true” special forces (although I would include SEALs and some special air).
Air Force air strikes were not great–1 out of 3 hit the target, and the so-called super bomb, the BLU-82, did not explode as advertised.
Bin Laden's “order of battle” was surmised to be an inner circle of Saudis, Yemenis, and Egyptians, with an outer circle of Afghans, Algerians, Jordanians, Chechnyans, and Pakistanis.
Taliban liked to wear black on black…I could not help being reminded of the Viet-Cong.
Terrain blocked our radios. General Clark and others have made it clear that we are not trained, EQUIPPED, or organized for mountain operations, and between this point, and the personal knowledge I have of how few special Chinooks we have that can operate above 12,000 feet–and only because their CWO pilots have learned to fart into the fuel–it's clear the US is not serious about mountain or jungle warfare, and marginally competent as urban warfare.
After seven days they were out of batteries and water.
There was a “surrender” gambit when they got close, the primary purpose being to keep an Afghan warlord between Bin Laden and the Americans.
We still have total disconnect between ground troop use of grids on a map, and Air Force demand for latitude and longitude. The $150 GPS conversion is great, Navy and Air Force still not joint.
Lovely account of how they did a field hire of a seeming gift from heaven, a second translator who spoke English, only to learn later he also spoke Arabic and had been sent as a penetration. Sidebar on Pakistani penetration of the Afghan group they were with.
No mules. Very very tough to resupply in the mountains in winter. Even without loads, four kilometers on one occasion took five hours.
Bin Laden evidently wrote his will on the 14th of December, coincident with his rather desperate sounding call over the radio to all to arm their women and children.
We dropped 1100 “precision” bombs and $550 “dumb” bombs on Tora Bora, plus tens of thousands of rounds of other artillery and ammunition. I am so reminded of Viet-Nam, where what we paid for artillery shells being fired could have bought every Vietnamese a two-story cinderblock house with electricity and running water.
Author concludes that the CIA model of buying warlords DOES NOT WORK for specific objectives.
I learn for the first time that a visit was made to Tora Bora after the fact, a forensic visit. [He know from Bin Laden's later emergence that he did get out.]
The author is scathingly critical of the Army Center for Army Lessons Learned, which has exactly one hit on Tora Bora against thousands of documents visible via the web.
What I learned from this:
DELTA is over-trained and under-utilized.
Conventional Army leaders have no idea how to use special forces in advance of operations or deep behind enemy lines–they simply do not have the mind-set.
CIA paramilitary and some clandestine needs to be transferred into a new Active Measures Command that is the dark and dirty side of Irregular Warfare.
I ended up buying this book without much to go on *other than* the not inconsequential fact that at least one War College student relied very heavily on it for their paper on irregular warfare. The book is dedicated to Maxwell Taylor and Jacques Massu, and has a foreword from Lyndon LaRouche that slams Zbigniew Brzezinski as an appeaser and compromiser with respect to Middle Eastern terrorism, so right away my appetite is whetted.
The publisher or seller should have done this, but to encourage others to add this book to their reflections, here are the *top-level* divisions in the table of contents:
I Foundations
1. The Essence of Irregular Warfare
2. Irregular Warfare and Revolution
3. Irregular Warfare and International Law
II Irregular Warfare and Grand Strategy
1. General Strategic-Political Problems
2. Nuclear War and Irregular War as Alternatives in the Unconventional Conduct of War
3. The Threat of Nuclear and Irregular War in the Process of War Prevention
III War of Blurred Contours
1. The Problem of Space
2. The Problem of Time
3. Movement, Terrain, and Population
IV Preparation of Irregular Warfare
1. The Conspiracy
2. Subversion
3. Armament
V Covert Combat
1. The Nature of Covert Combat
2. Leadership Problems
3. Terrorism and Sabotage in Covert Combatg
4. Assassinations and Raids in Covert Combat
VI Transition to Open Combat
1. Covert Combat and Open Combat
2. Unsolved Problems of the Transition to Open Combat
This book was published in 1986. The bibliography is very deep. There is no index.
I suspect it will be reprinted now that the adults are paying attention to Irregular Warfare. My impression continues to be confirmed that we need a completely new craft of intelligence for irregular warfare, and that we need to more clearly understand the spectrum of irregular warfare from black assassinations to white peace operations “one cell call at a time.”
Best in Class MILITARY Manual–Need Civilian Peace SOP, October 15, 2008
Sarah Sewall et al
The publisher should load the table of contents and nominate this important book for “Inside the Book” digitization.
Since the publisher has failed to do that, for now (pending my substantive summative review) I will just list the top level table of contents.
Chapter 1. Insurgency & Counterinsurgency
Chapter 2. Unity of Effort: Integrating Civilian and Military Activities
[This is fine for a military cursory glance, but what we really need are two other volumes: a civilian counterpart to this military manual; and a strategic planning mannual that includes both resources we control and resources we can influence with unclassified multinational decision support]
Chapter 3. Intelligence in Counterinsurgency
[This chapter is deep and broad–someone tried very hard to get it right and at first glance, it appears vastly superior to the tripe that has been published before.]
Chapter 4. Designing Counterinsurgency Campaigns and Operations
[This is new thinking and demands careful reading]
Chapter 5. Executing Counterinsurgency Operations
Chapter 6. Developing Host-Nation Security Forces
[This will need development, perhaps in the strategic manual. Apart from the obvious that the professionals knew but the political lightweights refused: go in strong enough to keep the peace, do not disband the armed forces and police, pay them first, it seems to me we need to do much much more with Ambassador Bob Oakley's original thinking on Policing the New World Disorder, and invest heavily in REGIONAL stability forces and REGIONAL gendarme reserve forces.]
Chapter 7. Leadership and Ethics for Counterinsurgency
[Important, but I continue to be shocked at the way we vacuum people into confinement, and by the reality that stupid kids with camaras not-withstanding, we cannot overcome an unethical White House or Secretary of Defense in the field–this section could use discussion of what constitutes an illegal order and what each level of operations can do to refuse an illegal order.]
Chapter 8. Sustainment
[Good start but already out of date. Army is doing some extraordinary things in “eating the tail” by implementing renewable power solutions at the outposts so that ground-based heavy logistics are dramatically reduced. Very positive focus on logistics preparation of the battlefield but misses the larger issue: secret intelligence could care less about logisticians, who have a legitimate need for bridge weights, tunnel clearance, ferry times, pierside outlet specifications, cross-country trafficability, line of sight distances along the supply line, and so on. The fact is that intelligence support to both acquisition and to logistics STINKS, and this needs draconian scorched earth management.]
Appendix A. A Guide for Action
Appendix B. Social Network Analysis and Other Analytical Tools
Appendix C. Linguist Support
Appendix D. Legal Considerations
Appendic E. Airpower in Counterinsurgency
I like this book, very much. It's is a really good first step, but it is only a UNILATERAL MILITARY first step.
The U.S. Government is still not serious–in the White House or in Congress–about deep sustained interagency and coalition operations.
They have no idea how to create a Global Range of Gifts Table down to the household level, how to call in Peace from the Sea and Peace from Above, how to use decision support to influence $500 billion a year in investments by others, how to encourage call centers in China and India (each of which have 1.5 billion for a total of 3 billion of the 5 billion poor) that can both provide instant translation support to operators and free education to the poor, in their own language, “one cell call at a time.”
Bottom line: General Al Gray nailed it in 1989, in his article “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's.” Key words: “peaceful preventive measures, non-state actors, and open source intelligence.” No one wanted to listen then, and most are still conceptually-challenged now.
Another Nail in the Coffin of Power without Principle, May 29, 2009
David Ray Griffin
“This book is part of a growing body of non-fiction that illuminates the cataclysmic gap between those with power, who do as they please, and those with knowledge, who are not heard. At least 80% of what is done `in our name' with our tax dollars is wasteful, lacks intellectual integrity, and does great harm to humanity both at home and abroad. Unless President Obama breaks out of the closed circle of power to connect with the kind of independent knowledge found in this book, he will remain a captive `front' for the Empire Enterprise.”
Above is the jacket blurb I provided after reading the galley copy, and it disappoints me that the publisher has not done a better job of sharing information with prospective buyers using all the tools that Amazon provides.
935 lies, 25 high crimes and misdemeanors, all documented, all led by Dick Cheney, the most nakedly amoral man–and the most powerful–ever to dominate a White House, a Congress, and the abuse of all that could be done “in our name.”
When combined with the massive cover-up of 9-11, a pre-planned cover-up that included nine nations warning us in advance, Dick Cheney scheduling a nation-wide exercise that put him personally “in control” of the entire US Government and the US military specifically (wisely putting his command center on the piers in NYC as he knew in advance that the city's command center in WTC would not be usable), with Rudy Guliani all ready with pre-ordered trucks to “scoop and dump” the crime scene to the point that firefighters rioted–the mind just spins at the separation of the public from its government, of the political arm of government from reality, and of both the political and professional arms of government from ethics.
I will list just six other titles here, one each on 9-11, the Kennedy assassination, and the King assassination, and three that I have sponsored, the latter three free online but also here at Amazon in hard-copy.
A people who mean to govern themselves must arms themselves with information. A Republic if you can keep it. A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry. Madison, Franklin, and Jefferson, all turning in their graves over Dick Cheeny and the two-party crime system we allow.
Explains Violence and Anger in Rural West,June 5, 2009
Joel Dyer
I have spent my life in government (30 years) and studying the causes of revolution and instability, and I would sum up the core insight as this: violent anger is spawned by unfairness and feelings of helplessness combined with a loss of faith in “authority” or existing mechanisms for conflict resolution.
This book joins a growing body of literature that I have been exploring that suggests that America is losing its mind as a nation, is fragmenting in multiple ways including states planning for secession, divides between rural and urban, increased ethnic violence especially among poor whites, and so on. There is also a growing literature on government ineptness if not actual mafeasance and betrayal of the public trust.
In terms of details, this book is persuasive in documenting either a federal cover-up or massive federal incompetence. The suspects not interviewed, the suspects blocked from testifying, it all adds up to the federal government having a story line that is not supported by the facts.
I just finished watching Gandhi for the 20th or so time as background to writing an article on Human Intelligence (HUMINT), and I fear for America. We have dumbed down the population and betrayed multiple demographic elements of the population is ways that will have consequences. The Obama Borg Administration being almost identical to the Bush-Cheney Borg Administration is certain to make the situation worse.
