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- Points
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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.
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.
