The McChrystal Report calls for a "New Strategy" using 110,000 foreign troops to control an area the size of six New Mexicos.
How is this possible ???
Marine Lt. Col. (Ret.) William Corson wrote The Betrayal to counter Westmoreland's Search-And-Destroy savagery. Too late in 1968 -- 2,600,000 dead Vietnamese -- but Corson had developed a solid anti-insurgent civil defense.
McChrystal's "New Strategy," thankfully, is Corson's "CAP" redux.
Still...
Vietnam is 125,000 sq. mi.: roughly twice the size of Florida. Vietnam maxed at 500,000 American troops.
Afghanistan is five times the size of Vietnam at 650,000 sq. mi. We're sitting at 110,000 troops in-country.
Does "Mc-C" know what a Tracking War requires? For example, that we have no dog teams for defensive tracking? Or for back-tracking? Does the General have a clue... that back-tracking insurgents is your offense?
Plus, the Afghan poppy crop is one helluva 800-pound gorilla. Womper-stomper, $80,000,000,000-a-year worldwide, opium/heroin empire... THAT gorilla.
Disappeared ??? Invisible?
Details and Bill Corson's Combined Action Program BTF :::
Combined Action Program
Let's not get lost in anti-military rhetoric. That war is going to be fought. It is Obama's war now, like it or not. There's also plenty of Sallafi-Wahhabi hate money to go around. Fundie fanatics willing to toss in $$$$$ to establish wack-job schools and a fantasy caliphate.
Corson made three basic arguments:
• That the Big War, the US military's conventional fight against North Vietnamese main force units, was irrelevant,
• That the Other War, the pacification effort to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, was being lost due to neglect and mismanagement, and
• That the corrupt Government of Vietnam (GVN) was not worthy of being saved.
That's about where we are now. Taliban suppression in Pakistan is the Big War. Translation works just fine:
• That the Big War, the US military and Pakistan's conventional fight against Taliban-al Qaeda is irrelevant to Afghanistan,
• That the Other War, the pacification effort to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, is being lost due to neglect and mismanagement, and
• That the corrupt Karzai Government is not worthy of being saved.
There's also the $80,000,000,000-a-year that goes to opium/heroin gangsters. Enough trickles back down to flood Afghanistan. Almost all of the heroin trade depends on Afghan poppy crops.
That Mississippi of poppies-to-heroin is not quite what you want to see continue, either.
Modernize Afghanistan ??? A good step to address both political and drug problems.
Gen. McChrystal in a Counterinsurgency Guidance to field units likens the American military in Afghanistan to a bull charging at a matador [the Taliban] - slightly weakened each time it is "cut".
******
Bill Corson recommended ending Search-And-Destroy in Vietnam. He's writing this in 1968, 7 years before the final defeat in 1975.
• Stop all aerial bombing of North Vietnam(Afghanistan).
• Eliminate all illegal land rents and agricultural taxes. These fund GVN(Karzai family) corruption and feed Vietcong(Taliban) propaganda.
• Educate eligible Vietnamese(Afghan) children at US universities as was done during the pacification campaign in the Philippines at the turn of the century.
• Accept responsibility for refugees and civilian casualties. Funds refugee assistance programs.
• Take control of American aid money. Stop payments to GVN(Karzai) ministers, province chiefs, and generals. General Stilwell paid his Chinese armies with a paymaster force of fifty officers.
• Reduce force levels and air bases. Integrate ARVN and US battalions. Put Regional and Popular Forces under US command, with 60,000 US troops, as a Combined Action Program.
LtCol Brendan B. McBreen, USMC, Central Corps Advisory Group, Pol-e-Charkhi, Afghanistan, DSN 318-231-8305, brendan.mcbreen@fob.baf.afgn.army(.smil).mil --
Notes on Afghanistan 2006. Corson's comments on corruption, officer selection, mirror imaging, and combined operations all apply to Afghanistan today. Corrupt leadership infects and destabilizes entire institutions. This is especially relevant to the Afghan National Army (ANA). We cannot condone corruption.
We need a controlling interest in [Afghan] officer selection and assignment. The tendency toward mirror-imaging with US equipment, tactics, training, and procedures needs to be balanced with local capabilities and requirements, especially for the embryonic ANA. The multiple coalition organizations in Afghanistan may be more in need of a strong combined headquarters than was needed in Vietnam in 1968.
Corson was a critic whose career suffered because he spoke out. His sometimes strident voice reflected his frustration with US self-delusion on the effectiveness of our chosen strategy. On American hubris and refusal to accept unwelcome facts, Corson wrote, "When one assumes infallibility, it is impossible to change a course of action."
One might well believe that Gen. McChrystal is smiting American hubris -- as identified by Corson and McBreen -- with his Report.
The prize in Afghanistan, surely, is not what we can get out of the Afghan people. What we need is not what we can get from them. For all of the bad teeth, the rural dirtiness, the dust, the look of being old at 30, the blank incomprehension -- what we need is them. We need them.
What happened in Southern Sector Command in Vietnam can be applied usefully in Afghanistan. Maybe by Gen. McChrystal.
Bill Corson hated to lose. Giving up the South Vietnamese peasantry to North Vietnamese control? Barely tolerable. He saw few good guys among the ruling classes:
...Rather, because the Vietnam War was a political war with ever shifting objectives, the Marine Corps was often yanked between Scylla and Charybdis by armchair warriors with little or no appreciation of the reality of Vietnam's combat, and by political generals who had their eyes on the next star rather than the challenges posed by Vietnam.
In the hamlets of Vietnam, the only thing that stood between the respective combatants and the peasants who only wanted to be left alone were the young Marines whose lives were placed at risk due to the vainglorious ambitions of our political leaders (elected and appointed) who counted on our obedience and "can do" spirit to "win" a war they had made "unwinnable" because of their incredible arrogance and stupidity. The final costs to our nation for going along with the fools and knaves who orchestrated the Vietnam War for all the wrong reasons have yet to be paid.
What Corson developed was the Combined Action Program. His 2,000 Marines on CAP duty assisted 114 hamlets which were spread across about 10% of the Vietnamese countryside. These CAP units were supported tooth-and-nail with dog-based Combat Tracking Teams, which were tasked with Tracking War daily operations.
For CAP to work, you need guns-with-legs in the nodes. You also need active tracking so that spotting or contact with insurgents leads immediately to active defense. And you need back-tracking. That's where dogs are uniquely valuable. You back-track to where the enemy came from and then shift over to full offensive action.
Back during Vietnam there were two lines of professional analysis related to CAP. Let's start with Westy:
General Westmoreland and the U.S. Army Command felt that the CAPs were a diversion from the principal mission of fighting main force units, and "opposed expanding the CAP concept to the other corps zones, believing that it would drain the strength of maneuver battalions (even though in all of the 114 CAP units there were only 2,000 U.S. personnel), duplicate the advisory effort and make the territories (rural population) dependent on American support." (See: Clarke, Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965-73, P.181)
In his memoirs, A Soldier Reports, Westmoreland says that although the Marines "achieved some noteworthy results" with the CAP program, "I simply had not enough numbers to put a squad of Americans in every village and hamlet. That would have been fragmenting resources and exposing them to defeat in detail."
SOB was nothing if not the assured liar.
Here's Andrew W. Krepinevich -- The Army and Vietnam (Balitmore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986) -- working from well known managerial resources.
Westmoreland's argument is not supported by the facts:
"First, it was not necessary to place Army squads in every village simultaneously; indeed the 'oil spot' principle called for gradual expansion outward from selected areas. Westmoreland's argument is more reflective of the Army's impatience with quick results in a conflict environment that would not produce them. Second, even if encadrement of every village and hamlet had been the requirement, a 1967 DOD report found that it could be met by utilizing 167,000 U.S. troops, far fewer than the 550,000 eventually assigned to South Vietnam." Within the 550,000 ceiling, Krepinevich says, there could have been a CAP force together with several Army divisions to counter any moves by major Communist forces, and "Casualties would have been minimized, and population security enhanced."
If we had eliminated the god-awful aerial bombing, using 167,000 U.S. troops was certainly doable. The contractors wouldn't have sold DoD some 9,000 aircraft during Vietnam. (9,000 aircraft at $3,000,000 apiece =EQ= $27,000,000,000.) But otherwise, apart from the political $$$$$, CAP was doable.
In Vietnam the total enemy force was easily ten times the size of the what we're up against in Afghanistan. Country size matters, mainly for logistics, but enemy force strength is higher on the list.
Equally important, there are no equivalents in Afghanistan to the Regular NVA Regiments. You don't even see the diesel pickup trucks, the ones that Bob Dole arranged for them so's they could load up for use against the Russians.
Large Talib and warlord forces run to a platoon or two. No where near a regiment.
Here's another opinion, from Daniel Ellsberg: in a report to his boss, Ambassador Porter, after an extended visit with CAP platoons:
"The CAP program is (circa 1967) the only pacification program in Vietnam which works."
Lest anyone thing that COMUSMACV assisted with running a cheap program that worked:
The other practical point involved that of "beans and bullets". As all of you know so well, Marines in Vietnam were not embarrassed by riches in terms of the logistical requirements. Both General Walt and Nickerson looked the other way as we begged, borrowed, and stole from the Army, Navy, and Air Force to enable our CAPs to function. Out of this effort emerged what was called the "Da Nang Mafia". Although midnight requisitions have long been a part of the Marine Corps way of doing business, I must say that the officers and SNCOs in the CAP headquarters raised that tradition to a new and higher standard, or "take". Also, I should acknowledge the monumental contribution of a classmate, and a former comrade in the Korean War, who had become a supply officer in the interim between Korea and Vietnam. As you may know, a number of regular line officers were ordered to an SDO or COMMO tour during that period. My friend chose to forsake his line MOS and go supply after completing his forced tour. When he hit Vietnam he was placed in charge of the Machine Records element. In this role he pilfered and provided me with in excess of 5,000 blank MR cards which enabled us to requisition a wide variety of material under several (non-Marine Corps) fake unit designations.
We broke every rule in the logistical book, and Lew Walt never even blinked when he visited a specially exposed CAP and saw light and heavy mortars, as well as 50 caliber machine guns in the hamlet. He also never blinked when he saw eleven year old Vietnamese children armed with M-2 carbines, provided by our friends in the USN, helping in the defense of their hamlet. A fact that was based on an act of deliberate insubordination on my part whereby I elected to arm the Vietnamese civilians in direct violation of orders. The Vietnamese "people", i.e., those we were expected to protect in the hamlets, were considered to be unreliable and the weapons would "fall into the hands of the Communists." That was nonsense. None of the weapons we provided the Vietnamese people, to help provide for their common defense, ever turned up in the hands of Communists. The Da Nang Mafia also "liberated" 12X12 lumber from the USAF which saved Marine lives and helped the CAPs to defend their hamlets by providing them with much needed essential overhead cover during the TET offensive. This wasn't "stealing" because according to McNamara's automated DOD supply system, there were no 12X12s in-country. They were on "back order".
I'll never forget the night we brought 84 truckloads of "hot" 12X12s to the CAP school. I was directing traffic from the hood of a jeep, and General Nickerson, in his silk robe, came striding up from his cottage and asked me, "What are you doing?" I replied, "We just knocked off the 7th. AF's lumber yard, and we're hiding the wood until we can get it to the CAPs." Nick waved his hand in a kind of exasperation and went back to bed. These things we did as a matter of course, and out of necessity, in order to fulfill our mission.
Pretty much the same things happened, getting the dog Combat Tracking Teams for CAP. CAPs were Marines, the dog teams were "lost" Army as much as not.... CAP sites were where the action was for locating Cong 24/7.
Although the mission of the CAPs, as we deduced it to be, was simple to state, it was difficult to accomplish. Stated simply, it was to keep the Vietnamese peasants and Marines in a given hamlet alive.
That's the mission in Afghanistan. We need those people.
Add back-tracking to wipe out source and you've pretty much got the mission.
"New Strategy" as replication of 40+-year old Combined Action Program tactics ??? Whatever works. And yeah... we lost the war in Vietnam. There's still every indication that CAP worked and that Bill Corson's invention fits well with Afghanistan.
One final point is that local support teams generate unique intelligence. CAP teams reported the NVA build up before the TET offensive. They could see the shifts in enemy movement patterns for months ahead of time. Reported unit-level details in dozens of situation reports.
Of course... this intel was ignored at the top. Those guys were out in villages, so what would they know?
If there had been a dozen CAP sites in the northern area, generating back-tracking operations, we'd have seen contact with the main NVA units months before they were ready to attack. TET would not have been a surprise. Controlling contact is about as important a factor as you'll get, running an anti-insurgency war.
Finally, because we need the Afghan people, here is a parallel to what we must give them:
Pacification includes a number of processes. However, it is not defined simply as a process. A better term is that it is descriptive of a condition. In the case of the hamlets in South Vietnam, it was the belief and perception of the Vietnamese people that they were safe in their own homes. This idea, or feeling of safety, was the sine qua non without which there was no "pacification purpose", or potential gain simply from providing the humanitarian assistance that the indigenous government had never provided. The CAP Marines, by virtue of their willingness to stand and die to protect the Vietnamese from their twin enemies, i.e., the Communists and the GVN [South Vietnamese Government] made believers out of the Vietnamese peasants. Once that had occurred, the hamlet had been "pacified".
Add basic education, upgrading the schools and building new ones to replace the medieval Taliban memorizing. Add clinics. Add clean water. Add a microloan program.
If the CAP sites could have been implemented across Vietnam and fully supported with 167,000 troops -- not the 550,000 troops we threw at it -- then Afghanistan with a tenth the number of insurgents and no need for Division-level full-strength units can see this "New Strategy" implemented with the 110,000 troops on hand.
The more dog-based Combat Tracking Teams you have in the mix, the fewer troops you need overall. Dogs are the no-tech multiplier.
Ain't that hard to do. Karzai corruption is a toughie -- beyond the scope of a simple military diary. The other missing factor, today, is the dog teams.