The United States Army (Or at Least Its Lesser Units)

To return to a point that I made earlier about the cultural differences between the Army and the Marine Corps, I direct your attention to this.  It's an article from the Army Times about 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, 5th Stryker brigade's deployment to Afghanistan and what appears to be a poor showing on their part in theater.  This battalion has suffered 21 KIA soldiers for a return of only 50 insurgents.  Compare this to 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines' deployment to Sangin, who suffered 29 KIA and hundreds wounded, who Secretary of Defense Gates described as having killed or captured most of the Taliban leadership in the area, and to whom hundreds hundreds of enemy dead are attributed.  And this, in the most hostile area of Afghanistan, with a history of poor security and high casualties.  

Several things struck me about 1-17's poor performance.  They were initially scheduled to deploy to Iraq, and there was a last minute change that sent them to Afghanistan.  Not an ideal circumstance, to be sure.  But why were they doing pre-deployment work-ups focusing on kinetic urban ops when they were heading to Iraq?  Presumably, since the article is from 2009, the predeployment phase occurred in 2007-2008 timeframe, during which counterinsurgency was paramount and kinetic operations in Iraq had died down.  Frankly, the serious kinetic operations in Iraq occurred primarily in 2004-2005, in the Sunni Triangle, and to a more limited extent in Southern Iraq against Sadrists.  Why the emphasis on kinetic ops, then?  

Second of all, if "the principles are the same," as one soldier admitted, what does it matter if "the details are night and day different?"  3/5's deployment to Sangin featured a density of improvised explosive devices that was unprecedented in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they figured it out and devised new techniques, tactics and procedures over the first couple months to deal with the problem.  Do soldiers really expect training to prepare them for every possible detail of their deployment?  Because that's simply not possible.  Things change constantly, and flexibility, adaptability, and improvisation are important skills for a warfighter to have in his or her toolbelt.  

Why are they whining about a lack of good intelligence prior to deploying?  They had google at their fingertips while CONUS, their leadership doubtless had peers who were already deployed to Afghanistan who could give them the scoop, and there are plenty of unclassified news sources and books that could flesh out their knowledge of Afghanistan and Northern Helmand Province.  Does the Army really expect for things to be handed to them on a silver platter?  

How can it possibly have been a surprise that there IEDs in Afghanistan?  I, a person other than grunt, was aware of the fact that the incredible number of Soviet-era landmines and ordnance in Afghanistan were being turned into crude IEDs due to the cross-pollination of insurgents between Iraq and Afghanistan.  Do they not read the news in the Army?  Even if you didn't know, why would you accept intelligence reports saying that there were no IEDs on face-value?  After Iraq, everyone in the military should have good policy regarding IEDs.  Why wouldn't you continue to use that policy?  

Regarding the use of dismounted patrols rather than vehicle mounted patrols, this is counterinsurgency 101.  Being dismounted gives you better visibility of your terrain, it gives you the opportunity to interact with the locals and distinguish friend from foe.  Even more basically, having figured out that there are IEDs around, why would you use vehicles that are limited to the poorly developed Afghan road system?  Why would you let the terrain canalize you due to your insistence on using vehicles?  When you do that, you're basically saying, "Hey, insurgents, I'm only going to be patrolling a few predictable places, so you should plant bombs there to kill me."  You are making yourself an obvious target.  This seems to be a common failing of the Army's mechanized units.  It's strange to me that the Marines in Sangin were literally blasting holes through walls to create new paths to travel to avoid IEDs and the Army couldn't be bothered to get their fat asses out of their Strykers to walk around.  

The cherry on top of the whole clusterfuck is when senior leadership talks about using an outdated counterguerrilla manual that's "complimentary" to the counterinsurgency manual that has superseded it.  

To be fair to the Army, there are absolutely Army units that are doing an outstanding job fighting our nation's enemies who have effectively adopted and implemented counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.  The difference, however, between the Army and Marine Corps, lies in consistency and attitude.  Marine units that are bad at counterinsurgency relative to other Marine units are still much, much better at counterinsurgency than most infantry forces, whereas Army units that are bad at counterinsurgency seem to be stumbling incompetently in the dark, incapable of being effective without being given explicit, detailed instructions on what they need to do.  

Soldiers were also whining to reporters to an extent that I can't imagine Marines doing and about things that I can't imagine Marines whining about, officially or unofficially.  The article gave me the impression that Army officers consistently failed to take the initiative to find out what exactly it was that they were getting into, failed to adapt quickly and effectively to changing circumstances, and failed at the basic leadership and mentorship necessary to make junior leaders who took initiative and applied the fundamentals of war to an unexpected situation.  

As a junior officer, I can't ever imagine saying something like "What we didn’t understand is really where the enemy was making his push against Kandahar city.  We did expect more of an open desert fight."  That statement is a leadership failure.  Of course the unexpected happened.  I can imagine saying, "This is what the enemy is doing, this is what we're doing to kill him, these are some ways that I expect him to adapt, these are the plans that we have for those adaptations."  Expectations are like "hope" and "luck."  You're allowed to have them, but you need to understand that they are always subordinate to the actual situation, and that the actual situation is probably much different than what you're expecting.  

We need to stop giving the Army so many nice things and force them to scrape, scrounge, adapt, improvise, and accomplish things through sheer force of will so that they become tough-minded, adaptive, problem solvers instead of whiners who expect to conduct military operations in a fantasy land that will never, ever conform to real life.