Niccolo Caldararo in "Afghanistan the U.S.'s Dien Bien Phu?" suggest that the USA in Afghanistan was repeating the mistakes of the French in Vietnam in 1954 when the French airbase at Dien Bien Phu was overrun by the Viet Minh.
This reply explains why the USA and NATO allies need to keep airbases in Afghanistan after the end of 2014 and what sort of political and military leadership it will take to hold those airbases against all foes and therefore avoid the Dien Bien Phu scenario.
How to avoid the Dien Bien Phu scenario
The goal of keeping airbases in Afghanistan is to use them to launch drones, air-raids and other air-power missions against our enemies in Pakistan - Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and their sponsors - the Pakistani military intelligence service - the Inter-Services Intelligence - the "ISI" - a state-within-a-state which operates outside the supervision of the elected government and which serves a hidden military dictatorship.
The evidence for Pakistan's secret terrorist war against the West can be viewed in the BBC's "SECRET PAKISTAN" videos.
Part 1 Double Cross
Part 2 Backlash
Niccolo's concern was appropriate. We must prepare for the threat of our bases being besieged, cut off by land and attempts to close the runways and shoot down the planes when landing and taking off - the "Dien Bien Phu" scenario and here's how we can ensure that never happens to our guys.
The starting point is NATO's half-assed plan for Afghanistan post-2014, they are calling "Resolute Support".
NATO Resolute Support plans for 6,000 NATO allied troops in support of a plan first suggested by NATO-ISAF commander General Dunford, for 10,000 US troops post-2014.
This existing plan for Resolute Support can only be a starting point because just about everything the US & NATO-ISAF has done in this war has been poorly planned by the brass.
NATO Resolute Support right now calls for 10,000 U.S. troops and about 6,000 from allied NATO nations in 4 Afghan airbases post-2014.
Is that enough to hold 4 airbases, against all foes?
Against the Taliban we've seen so far, maybe it would be enough. But NATO Resolute Support, we can be fairly certain, will not plan for worst-case scenarios such as
* the Afghan national army turns against us
* Pakistan supports the Taliban with its regular troops
* Iran supports the Taliban with its regular troops
So NATO Resolute Support is not a plan against all foes. We need to improve on that. We need more. What exactly?
To make NATO Resolute Support a sure-fire success, we also need AN ENGINEERS SURGE, a surge of military engineers working to a precisely prepared scientific plan to fortify the airbases, constructing extensive perimeter and base defences, to secure a very wide area around the air base to keep besieging enemy fire out of range of the runways and the take-off and landing flight paths.
Only then can the numbers being talked about hold the airbases against all foes.
This engineers surge and what exactly those engineers are supposed to do cannot responsibly be left to be improvised by troops and their commanders in the field.
By the time our forces finally appreciate their precarious supply predicament when surrounded by enemy forces besieging our Afghan airbases it will be, at that late stage, far too late to avoid our forces being trapped and starved of supplies.
The task to secure an airbase supplied entirely by airlift in a war zone and to hold it indefinitely versus all foes is a very hard military task with a history of disastrous failed attempts.
Surrounded troops cannot be easily reinforced or evacuated. Throughout military history, troops which get surrounded by the enemy and which cannot be relieved by a ground army breaking through the lines of the besieging forces have often found that they had no other option but to surrender.
However, as President John F Kennedy said, we choose to go to the moon and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.
Compared to going to the moon, compared even to designing and building a modern jet-fighter, this is a comparatively simple task for our scientists and engineers to plan for.
Designing and building a fortified airbase is easier than rocket science but is still a harder scientific and engineering task than the military can routinely do.
It is not a job that our officers out of military academy have learned how to do.
As for what support role the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) can provide? Well there I do think they'd be very central to the construction of airbase fortifications.
I've no doubt that whatever they were asked to do, the USACE would do an excellent job of it.
The issue right now is that airbases have not been well fortified in the war on terror. Not in Iraq and not in Afghanistan.
Recently 2 US Marine generals were fired because of their failure to secure against a Taliban attack on Bastion airbase that destroyed 8 Harrier jump jets and killed 2 Marines.
That wasn't the first very damaging attack on our air bases and it won't be the last.
The USACE is not being tasked with the plans and the resources to build really effective airbase fortifications.
That's why I say we need a specialist team of scientist and engineers to be set up by Pentagon, perhaps with the president telling them to get on with it if they haven't already - to come up with plans for extensive fortifications versus siege to keep the enemy well out of range to make sure that airbases stay open and supplies get in even under the most intense enemy mortar bombardments against the runways and anti-aircraft machine gun fire and ground-to-air missiles against the aircraft when they are taking off and landing and so on.
It's probably going to take some academic scientists and engineers from the top American universities to be seconded to the Joint Chiefs of Staff to get the ball rolling on this but they won't be able to get much done without a budget and orders to get on with it.
Of course the USACE are critical and necessary for this but they can't be expected to do it all on their own otherwise they would have built such fortifications around our airbases we had in Iraq and the airbases we still have in Afghanistan already.
The fact that the fortifications around the airbases in Afghanistan are pitiful and completely inadequate right now proves my point that this task needs a big national and international focus on it, by the US president even.
It won't take a new NASA to do this but it will take something above and beyond what is in place at the Pentagon and NATO just now.
So this task is comparatively simple and doesn't require Wernher von Braun, the first great rocket scientist, who led the Apollo mission from a scientific and engineering point of view.
However, planning for this military operation is indeed a task for the attention of our best military scientists and engineers rather than a task left to the professional military serving in Afghanistan to tackle all on their own.
It needs a specialist team of scientists and engineers to lead. My bet is that no such team has been set up. That's the issue. Unpreparedness by government for a hard but possible task.
Obama is no JFK. He wants to bring the troops home as soon as he can. He doesn't want to set up a special team to design fortified air bases for Afghanistan. He's not aware of the issue.
It's a problem of political leadership. We need leaders with something of JFK about them, to lead the people to strive to do the harder task, even though it is not as hard as going to the moon.
There could be a contribution made by British or other European scientists and engineers. I've published my outline plans elsewhere already.
Perimeter defences for a military base for the Global War on Terror.
Wide-area layout plan for the zones and perimeter defences for a military base for the Global War on Terror
For more details, see the topic
"Perimeter defences plan for a military base"
in the
AfPak Mission forum.
But again for British and European scientists to get their ideas into practice would take leadership from the NATO leaders and they are as useless as the Pentagon in terms of coming up with new plans.
So I could help do the science and engineering required but I'm in no way well positioned or suited to doing the political leadership job.
So for this task, I could do the Wernher von Braun role, as could many other scientists out there. But who is going to do the JFK part of the job?
Where are the political leaders who will get the government to set up the required team of scientists and engineers?
The political and military leaders, politicians and generals, we have in post just now, don't seem to be thinking about this issue.
I don't have any doubt that if I were in charge of our military I could manage this but, sadly, I'm not in charge and those who are in charge, worry me as to their competence, to be honest.