# Fire-Force and Pseudo-Teams in Afghanistan



## Infanteer (13 Aug 2011)

http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/securing-and-holding-rural-territory

This is probably just as suitable in the "Joint" forum - but I'll put it here from the tactical standpoint.  An interesting article over at the Small Wars Journal, if anything for the technical aspects. These pop-up once in a while - I have a Marine Corps Gazette article explaining a similar approach taken by a Marine outfit in Iraq that apparently worked well.  I looked over a map of the TFK AO and often mused that one of these may have been handy in some respects.  

A few thoughts from a discussion over there:

1. The article needs references. The authors are pulling out percentages of kills/contact in various conflicts and make no reference to where this information came from. How do they know that the percentages are accurate? How was the data collected? I can put up any numbers I want and say they are facts, but this doesn't make them true.

2. There is a bit of romanticism involved with the "Fireforce Concept" - _"let's get away from clumsy, slow patrols and have a fast-moving, roving squad that kills anything it catches"_.  Sounds nice, but there is nothing that says "conventional COIN tactics" are any better or worse at killing insurgents; the authors don't make a case by throwing out figures with no primary sources.  History certainly doesn't back this up, as Malaya isn't a communist country and Rhodesia can only be found in 30 year old atlases.  To be fair, the authors do differentiate between the tactical aspects and the sociopolitical ones, but I still find it hard to take the "these are better tactics" argument at face value. 

3. That being said, I found the authors did make numerous excellent points.  Number 1 is that the hardest thing is cut-off.  We studied and practiced cut-off before our deployment, but the difficulty in reality is something else.  Having 4 "G-Cars" (Griffons) with 4-man sticks sitting in a FOB or roaming around the AO to be plunked out after a TIC occurs is an awesome idea.

4. The second really good point from the paper is the Pseudo-Teams as the primary method of locating insurgents.  Indigineous irregular forces are the best at hunting bad-guys - the experience of the South Vietnamese PRUs is another example (and Mark Moyar's book gives the figures to back the claim).  The two roadblocks in Afghanistan are the lack of a integrated efforts between the Afghan Forces (ANA, ANP, NDS) and the total barrier that exists between conventional and special operations forces.  It's like two armies running two wars, and if this wasn't sorted out, the chances for blue on blue would be huge.  Not saying this can't be sorted out in Afghanistan, but these two impediments need big-time political muscle to sort out if you want to employ pseudo-teams with a hunter-killer element such as a Fireforce.

5.  I question the applicability of a "direct copy", such as the article suggests, of the Fireforce concept to Afghanistan. A very small, dense AO and the socio-political standing of the Afghan qala can make something like this tricky to pull off.  Going from Maiwand to Arghandab (covering most of the Kandahar insurgency) doesn't take long and Helmand has similar geography.  Helicopters are likely to just see farmers unless they are already finding a TIC.  Pursuit can be very difficult to almost impossible - I remember reading about the Koevoet (different bush war) bashing bushes and chasing spoor; you'd lose spoor pretty quickly as insurgents on the back of their bike make their way to a bazaar.  As someone said previously, "context, context, context".

7. How to take elements of this? I still think the best element is the very quick airmobile cutoff.  I was kicking this around in my mind the other day. 7 Birds in a bigger FOB would work (2 x Kiowa (K-Car), 4 x Utility (G-Car), 1 x Cargo (Reserve)). The key would be having a system which allowed the G-Cars to respond to TICs and employ cut-off immediately and for the Reserve to deploy, perhaps with Afghan special police, to sweep compounds once it was determined that cut-off was affected.

Anyways, my 2 cents.


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## a_majoor (13 Aug 2011)

Although I am away from my personal reference library, this really seems to be an update of fairly traditional counter insurgency tactics. Replace Helicopters with "Cavalry" or "Mounted Rifles" and pull the names of irregular auxiliary troops out of the hat and you get the idea.

British Cavalry used a tactic they called "Cresting the Heights" to secure routes (riding troops ahead to take the high feature on a route), which can be read right out of Xenophon in the Anibasis, or Soviet helicopter assault forces landing on high features in Afghanistan in the 1980's to cover the advance of their forces.

The only thing which seems new is the increasing emphasis on communications and situational awareness, but then again, British Imperial forces in the NorthWest Frontier could reliably communicate over long distances using signal mirrors, so how much has really changed? Perhaps the only real change is the level of control has increased dramatically; Xenophon was on his own, a British Cavalry officer in the Army of India read dispatches several days to several weeks old, the Soviet Air Assault Commander had his CO on the radio and we have someone watching us in real time on a plasma screen monitor wondering why #1 Rifleman isn't going more left.


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## Infanteer (13 Aug 2011)

I agree Thucydides - I had a little trouble with the authors creating a bit of a false dichotomy of "conventional" and "fireforce" COIN tactics, especially with their lack of any references to their claims.

Establishing cut-off is key; it is at the root of the article and is probably at the root of counter-guerrilla tactics.  It took me a while to figure out why my ambushes were unsuccessful in Afghaninstan - insurgents tend not to walk around with weapons in their hands.  When an opponent uses the tactic of cache-shoot-scoot-cache-farm, quarantining the area and investigating all fighting aged males is critical.


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## GAP (13 Aug 2011)

Infanteer said:
			
		

> http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/securing-and-holding-rural-territory
> 
> 7. How to take elements of this? I still think the best element is the very quick airmobile cutoff.  I was kicking this around in my mind the other day. 7 Birds in a bigger FOB would work (2 x Kiowa (K-Car), 4 x Utility (G-Car), 1 x Cargo (Reserve)). The key would be having a system which allowed the G-Cars to respond to TICs and employ cut-off immediately and for the Reserve to deploy, perhaps with Afghan special police, to sweep compounds once it was determined that cut-off was affected.



They learn too....I can envision sacrificing a small element to draw in all these wonderful slowmoving airmobile forces.....then hit them with multiple RPG's....sorta what happened recently...you only have to get it right once.

The Viet Cong did practice deceptions like this, I wouldn't put it past the Taliban...


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## Old Sweat (13 Aug 2011)

Gap

I agree with your point. I hate to say it, but as a Vietnam era soldier, I thought our side was being too aggressive in the use of Chinooks in forward areas during fights and dreaded the day, or night, when the Taliban knocked one out of the sky by chance or design. I don't want to second guess the people involved and we certainly don't have all the facts, but if you take risks, sometimes the odds fall the wrong way.


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## Infanteer (13 Aug 2011)

Well, that is obvious.  The use of helicopters in any situation involves risk, especially if one is templated.  The regular resupply flights to the FOBs are just as liable to be blown out of the sky.

It shouldn't eliminate the concept as a viable use of air-mobility in a theatre.


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## Old Sweat (13 Aug 2011)

I am talking about using large helicopters in 'first wave" situations, with or without escorts, into a 'hot" LZ environment. There is a risk in other flights such as resupply, as events have shown, but the risk is not as great. It may still be that this event is so rare, that it can be discounted, but I don't know one way or the other.


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## a_majoor (14 Aug 2011)

If we really want to do this sort of thing using helicopters, maybe we need to establish a "Cavalry" helicopter or airplane with the size and mobility needed to operate out of FOBs or FARPs, rugged enough to fly with minimal maintenance and capable of carrying a "stick" of four soldiers in full kit. I deliberately limit the number of troops to four to minimize the footprint of both the helicopters and the unit on the ground, and since our own doctrine usually has security/cutoff elements based on half sections.

This would suggest something along the lines of the "Little Bird" or Kiowa, but built for austere conditions. (If you were to use an airplane, the Cessna Caravan comes to mind). The Rhodesian Aérospatiale Alouette III is another example, although that airframe is obsolete and long out of production. As mentioned, the critical weakness is the helicopters themselves. Coming under fire as you depart the FOB/FARP will really screw up the plan, and the other obvious danger point is having the cutoffs tracked down so their helicopter assets come under fire during pickup. From a technical point of view, perhaps the only way to get around this is to have the cutoff units equipped for air to air refuelling and have them on standby flying around the AOR or parked in a distant location. The big danger here is the cutoffs will have a longer response time, as well as the added complexity of air to air refuelling.

Off the top of my head, there seems to be no obvious technical "work arounds" to minimize the issues or dangers in the near term, careful planing and aggressive use of the tactic will probably keep the risks to an acceptable level.


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## daftandbarmy (14 Aug 2011)

Interesting and coincidental. I was just this weekend musing with with a guy I know (who served in the Fireforce with the RLI in Rhodesia and has several combat jumps to his credit, as well as recent experience in central Asia) about deploying a Fireforce type program in Afghanistan.

The asset mix is secondary to the political and military will to do it right. The Afghans couldn't do it alone, and coalition troops would need to be prepared for more than a 'drive by' approach to COIN in order to make it work and deploy the full spectrum of resources (overt, covert, etc). This would contradict the recent 'pull out' policy, and a tendency towards 'battlefield tourism' by western forces e.g., being tied to FOBs, coming home each night to pizza/TV/Skype etc.

I also doubt we'd have the political will to do what was neccessary to finish the job right either. Imagine what the press/ Karzai would say following ops resulting in a body count of bad guys in the hundreds?


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## Infanteer (14 Aug 2011)

Thucydides said:
			
		

> If we really want to do this sort of thing using helicopters, maybe we need to establish a "Cavalry" helicopter or airplane with the size and mobility needed to operate out of FOBs or FARPs, rugged enough to fly with minimal maintenance and capable of carrying a "stick" of four soldiers in full kit. I deliberately limit the number of troops to four to minimize the footprint of both the helicopters and the unit on the ground, and since our own doctrine usually has security/cutoff elements based on half sections.



That sounds like the Griffon to me....


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## a_majoor (14 Aug 2011)

Infanteer said:
			
		

> That sounds like the Griffon to me....



After it was ruggidized to meet the austere environment criteria it would be an entirely new aircraft....


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## a_majoor (25 Aug 2011)

I stumbled upon a strange idea from the 1960's, the Convair Model 49, which was a fire support platform that could: 

a. Take off and land in a vertical orientation,
b. Fly horizontally at high speed to and from the target area
c.  Attack ground targets at speed or transition back to hover to fight
d. Land and fight on the ground like a light tank.

Clearly I need to start taking whatever these Covair engineers had.

Assuming such a beast could be made to work, this would be a great fireforce support platform, able to dash out and provide cutoff and fire support, while based from small FOBs/FARPs and other minimal footprint areas. (A coleoptre has its rotors enclosed, so striking the walls of the FOB would not be an issue). A more modern interpretation of the idea would be a coleoptre UAV/UACV which would provide the firepower for the rapid reaction force.

As for getting the troops on the ground, small helicopters like the "Little Bird" still seem to make the most sense in terms of speed and footprint, but as an alternative a very low ground pressure vehicle like an evolved version of the BV-206 which is not bound by roads (or almost anything) would provide the mobility and ability to work around most choke points and restrictive terrain, so the cut offs can appear unexpectedly.

The way I am reading this, *we* should be the small, high tech force to provide the fast cutoffs and high tech support, while the (insert local national army/constabulary/militias here) provides the bulk of the manpower and the "presence" in the AOR.


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