DYNAMISM, STASIS, AND 21st CENTURY WARFARE

In an important piece in today's WSJ, Robert Kaplan argues that the army has regressed to its bureaucratic ways in Afghanistan, with serious consequences.

Two years ago this month, fewer than 100 men of the Army's 5th Special Forces Group, based out of Fort Campbell, Ky. -- almost all of them non-commissioned officers -- essentially took down the Taliban regime on their own. Along with a handful of Air Force Special Ops embeds, they succeeded where the British and the Soviets before them in Afghanistan had failed, because they had been given no specific instructions. The bureaucratic layers between the U.S. forces and the secretary of defense were severed. They were told merely to link up with the "indigs" (indigenous Northern Alliance and friendly Pushtun elements) and make it happen.

The result was that they grew beards and rode horses from one redoubt to the next, even as their team sergeants called in air strikes without first seeking written approval. Because 5th Group was allowed to operate independently of the vertical, Industrial Age hierarchy of the Pentagon, and because it combined 19th-century warfare with 21st-century close air support (CAS), 5th Group achieved the very post-industrial military "transformation" that elites in Washington are incessantly talking about, but don't seem to understand -- because real transformation, which involves the dilution of central control, would make many of these elites themselves redundant.

But now, military transformation is receding behind us in Afghanistan. With Saddam Hussein in custody, the Pentagon is focusing on the capture of Osama bin Laden, who may be in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area. Yet success against bin Laden means going back to what we did right two years ago.

Of the roughly 10,000 American troops in Afghanistan, only a fraction of them are doing anything directly pivotal to the stabilization of the country. The rest are either part of a long support tail or part of newly-created layers of command at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, which micro-manage and complicate the work of a relatively small number of Army SF troops (Green Berets) located at various "fire bases."

Instead of powering-down to a flattened hierarchy of small, autonomous units dispersed over a wide area -- what the 1940 Marine "Small Wars Manual" recommends for fighting a guerrilla insurgency -- we have barricaded ourselves into a mammoth, Cold War-style base at Bagram that drains resources from the fire bases. It is ironic that just as the Pentagon is proposing a more light and lethal worldwide basing posture (with many smaller footprints rather than a few large ones in Korea and Europe), in Afghanistan, whose mountains and tribes make it the most unconventional of battlefields, we have reverted to such an antiquated arrangement.

Half of the U.S. soldiery in Afghanistan is garrisoned at Bagram, creating a footprint so large, so vulnerable, and so beside the point of why we are there in the first place, that terms like "Westmorelandization," "Sovietization" and the "self-licking ice cream cone" come to mind when describing the place and what it represents. I make these harsh statements after a month embedded at various SF fire bases in Afghanistan, speaking to dozens of non-commissioned and middle level officers, and drawing upon my own experience of covering the mujahideen insurgency against the Soviets in the 1980s.

Read the whole thing. This link should work for the next week, but I recommend buying the paper. (I have an extremely truncated piece on the same page.)

On a micro scale, Todd Seavey calls my attention to this depressing article:

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. - Fearing roadside bombs and sniper bullets, members of the Army Reserves' 428th Transportation Co. turned to a local steel fabricator to fashion extra armor for their 5-ton trucks and Humvees before beginning their journey to Iraq earlier this month.

But their armor might not make it into the war, because the soldiers didn't get Pentagon approval for their homemade protection.

The Army, which is still developing its own add-on armor kits for vehicles, doesn't typically allow any equipment that is not Army tested and approved, Maj. Gary Tallman, a Pentagon spokesman for Army weapons and technology issues, said Thursday.

"It's important that other units out there that are getting ready to mobilize understand that we are doing things" to protect them, Tallman said, "but there's policy you have to consider before you go out on your own and try to do something."

The possibility that soldiers could be denied extra protection because of an Army policy has outraged some of the friends and neighbors who tried to help the Missouri reserve unit.

"I think it's the stupidest thing I ever heard of," said Virgil Kirkweg, owner of a Jefferson City steel company, which rushed to meet the reserve unit's armor request. "I just hope the government is not dumb enough to make them go out there without something that's going to protect them somewhat."

Read the whole thing.