A
aesop081
Guest
and you will see that the 24th MEU is equiped with CH-53s as well
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/usmc/24meu.htm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/usmc/24meu.htm
Marines to Afghanistan
- Thread starter tomahawk6
- Start date
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 260
I had the opportunity to work with the Marines in Kabul in 06 at Camp Black Horse and I have to say those guys are OUTSTANDING. It is a small world and I hope I get to see them again in 08 this time in the south.
Tow Tripod
Tow Tripod
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
Latest:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hrCv_cDe9d8ARDqyjEs8ULaMiryQD8U5UPF80
Earlier:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/09/AR2008010903724.html
One assumes the MEU air assets will largely be based at Kanadahar, along with the training battalion.
During the 2001 "invasion" there were around 400/600 Special Forces and CIA personnel in Afstan (can't find a precise reference)--nothing close to 30,000. The first conventional US formation, a thousand-plus Marines, started arriving at Kandahar in late November after the Taliban had been routed in most of the country by the Northern Alliance, with US air and US and Brit special forces/covert types assistance. What ahistorical journalism.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/11/26/ret.afghan.marines/index.html
Mark
Ottawa
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hrCv_cDe9d8ARDqyjEs8ULaMiryQD8U5UPF80
Earlier:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/09/AR2008010903724.html
One assumes the MEU air assets will largely be based at Kanadahar, along with the training battalion.
During the 2001 "invasion" there were around 400/600 Special Forces and CIA personnel in Afstan (can't find a precise reference)--nothing close to 30,000. The first conventional US formation, a thousand-plus Marines, started arriving at Kandahar in late November after the Taliban had been routed in most of the country by the Northern Alliance, with US air and US and Brit special forces/covert types assistance. What ahistorical journalism.
http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/central/11/26/ret.afghan.marines/index.html
Mark
Ottawa
- Reaction score
- 5
- Points
- 430
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/14/AR2008011402722_pf.html
Allies Feel Strain of Afghan War
Troop Levels Among Issues Dividing U.S., NATO Countries
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; A01
The U.S. plan to send an additional 3,200 Marines to troubled southern Afghanistan this spring reflects the Pentagon's belief that if it can't bully its recalcitrant NATO allies into sending more troops to the Afghan front, perhaps it can shame them into doing so, U.S. officials said.
But the immediate reaction to the proposed deployment from NATO partners fighting alongside U.S. forces was that it was about time the United States stepped up its own effort.
After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict, including troop levels and missions, reconstruction, anti-narcotics efforts, and even counterinsurgency strategy. Stress has grown along with casualties, domestic pressures and a sense that the war is not improving, according to a wide range of senior U.S. and NATO-member officials who agreed to discuss sensitive alliance issues on the condition of anonymity.
While Washington has long called for allies to send more forces, NATO countries involved in some of the fiercest fighting have complained that they are suffering the heaviest losses. The United States supplies about half of the 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, they say, but the British, Canadians and Dutch are engaged in regular combat in the volatile south.
"We have one-tenth of the troops and we do more fighting than you do," a Canadian official said of his country's 2,500 troops in Kandahar province. "So do the Dutch." The Canadian death rate, proportional to the overall size of its force, is higher than that of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, a Canadian government analysis concluded last year.
British officials note that the eastern region, where most U.S. forces are based, is far quieter than the Taliban-saturated center of British operations in Helmand, the country's top opium-producing province. The American rejoinder, spoken only in private with references to British operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is that superior U.S. skills have made it so.
NATO has long been divided between those with fighting forces in Afghanistan and those who have restricted their involvement to noncombat activities. Now, as the United States begins a slow drawdown from Iraq, the attention of even combat partners has turned toward whether more U.S. troops will be free to fight in the "forgotten" war in Afghanistan.
When Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier visited Washington late last month, he reminded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Canada's Afghan mandate expires in January 2009. With most of the Canadian public opposed to a continued combat role, he said, it is not certain that Ottawa can sustain it.
Bernier's message was that his minority government could make a better case at home if the United States would boost its own efforts in Afghanistan, according to Canadian and U.S. officials familiar with the conversation.
"I don't think he expected an express commitment that day that they would draw down in Iraq and buttress in Afghanistan," the Canadian official said. "But he certainly registered Canadian interest and that of the allies involved."
According to opinion polls, Canadians feel they have done their bit in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper last fall named an independent commission to study options -- continuing the combat mission, redeploying to more peaceful regions, or withdrawing in January 2009. The commission report, due this month, will form the basis of an upcoming parliamentary debate.
With a Taliban offensive expected in the spring, along with another record opium poppy crop, the new Marines will deploy to the British area in Helmand and will be available to augment Canadian forces in neighboring Kandahar.
Both President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have toned down their public pressure on allies. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Bush at his Texas ranch in November, U.S. and German officials said, she told him that while Bonn would step up its contribution in quiet northern Afghanistan, any change in Germany's noncombat role would spell political disaster for her conservative government.
"It's not an excuse; it's simply reality -- coalition reality and domestic reality," a German official said. Merkel came away with Bush's pledge to praise Germany's efforts and stop criticizing.
Although Gates began a meeting of NATO defense ministers late last year by saying he would not let them "off the hook" for their responsibilities in Afghanistan, he said in a news conference at the end of the session that further public criticism was not productive.
Still, the Defense Department hopes that increasing its own contribution -- nearly half of an additional 7,500 troops Gates has said are needed in Afghanistan -- will encourage the allies. "As we're considering digging even deeper to make up for the shortfall in Afghanistan," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said, "we would expect our allies in the fight to do the same."
Many Europeans believe that the United States committed attention and resources to Iraq at Afghanistan's expense. But U.S. officials say the problems of NATO countries in Afghanistan have roots in not investing sufficiently in their militaries after the Cold War. Canada, U.S. officials say, needs American military airlift for its troops in Afghanistan because it got rid of a fleet of heavy lift helicopters.
At the same time that they want more from their partners, however, U.S. defense officials often disdain their abilities. No one, they insist, is as good at counterinsurgency as the U.S. military.
U.S. and British forces have long derided each other's counterinsurgency tactics. In Iraq, British commanders touted their successful "hearts and minds" efforts in Northern Ireland, tried to replicate them in southern Iraq, and criticized more heavy-handed U.S. operations in the north. Their U.S. counterparts say they are tired of hearing about Northern Ireland and point out that British troops largely did not quell sectarian violence in the south.
The same tensions have emerged in Afghanistan, where U.S. officials criticized what one called a "colonial" attitude that kept the British from retaining control over areas wrested from the Taliban. Disagreement leaked out publicly early last year when British troops withdrew from the Musa Qala district of Helmand after striking a deal with local tribal leaders. The tribal chiefs quickly relinquished control to the Taliban.
Britain, with a higher percentage of its forces deployed worldwide than the United States, is stretched thin in Afghanistan. Not only did the British have insufficient force strength to hold conquered territory, but the reconstruction and development assistance that was supposed to consolidate military gains did not arrive.
"It's worth reminding the Americans that the entire British army is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps," said one sympathetic former U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
After 10 months of Taliban control, Musa Qala was retaken in December in combat involving British, Afghan and U.S. forces. The new Marine deployments will supplement British troops, and both sides insist they have calmed their differences. "Whatever may or may not have been said between the two in the past," said one British official, ". . . we are now in the same place."
Now, he said, "the much more interesting question is where do we go from here, and can we sustain a cautiously positive picture in Musa Qala" and elsewhere.
British officials hope that new deployments and stepped-up Afghan security training by the Marines will address one of Helmand's biggest problems -- the expansion of the opium crop. Opium provides income for the Taliban and is a major source of corruption within the Afghan police and government, yet the allies are divided on how to stop its production.
U.S. officials in Afghanistan, led by Ambassador William B. Wood, have insisted that the current strategy of manually destroying opium fields is ineffective and have pressed to begin aerial spraying of herbicide. Wood is a former ambassador to Colombia, where the United States funds and operates the world's largest aerial effort to eradicate coca.
The British, in charge of NATO's anti-narcotics program in Afghanistan, strongly oppose spraying, as does Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who last month formally ruled it out over U.S. objections. But the government's preferred method of manual eradication -- sending Afghan troops and police to pull poppy plants out of the ground -- has faltered because of poor security.
More important, programs to provide rural Afghans with alternative income sources remain underfunded and poorly coordinated. Each of NATO's regional Afghan commands operates its own provincial reconstruction teams, and scores of nongovernmental organizations work in the country. But with few exceptions -- such as Khost province under U.S. command in the east, where military and reconstruction resources are meshed -- they share no overriding strategy or operational rules.
The United States has pressed U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to appoint a high-level representative to coordinate non-military activities in Afghanistan. Karzai has resisted, and Ban is said to be worried about taking responsibility for what he sees as a worsening situation.
Staff writers Thomas E. Ricks and Colum Lynch contributed to this report.
Allies Feel Strain of Afghan War
Troop Levels Among Issues Dividing U.S., NATO Countries
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; A01
The U.S. plan to send an additional 3,200 Marines to troubled southern Afghanistan this spring reflects the Pentagon's belief that if it can't bully its recalcitrant NATO allies into sending more troops to the Afghan front, perhaps it can shame them into doing so, U.S. officials said.
But the immediate reaction to the proposed deployment from NATO partners fighting alongside U.S. forces was that it was about time the United States stepped up its own effort.
After more than six years of coalition warfare in Afghanistan, NATO is a bundle of frayed nerves and tension over nearly every aspect of the conflict, including troop levels and missions, reconstruction, anti-narcotics efforts, and even counterinsurgency strategy. Stress has grown along with casualties, domestic pressures and a sense that the war is not improving, according to a wide range of senior U.S. and NATO-member officials who agreed to discuss sensitive alliance issues on the condition of anonymity.
While Washington has long called for allies to send more forces, NATO countries involved in some of the fiercest fighting have complained that they are suffering the heaviest losses. The United States supplies about half of the 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, they say, but the British, Canadians and Dutch are engaged in regular combat in the volatile south.
"We have one-tenth of the troops and we do more fighting than you do," a Canadian official said of his country's 2,500 troops in Kandahar province. "So do the Dutch." The Canadian death rate, proportional to the overall size of its force, is higher than that of U.S. troops in Afghanistan or Iraq, a Canadian government analysis concluded last year.
British officials note that the eastern region, where most U.S. forces are based, is far quieter than the Taliban-saturated center of British operations in Helmand, the country's top opium-producing province. The American rejoinder, spoken only in private with references to British operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is that superior U.S. skills have made it so.
NATO has long been divided between those with fighting forces in Afghanistan and those who have restricted their involvement to noncombat activities. Now, as the United States begins a slow drawdown from Iraq, the attention of even combat partners has turned toward whether more U.S. troops will be free to fight in the "forgotten" war in Afghanistan.
When Canadian Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier visited Washington late last month, he reminded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Canada's Afghan mandate expires in January 2009. With most of the Canadian public opposed to a continued combat role, he said, it is not certain that Ottawa can sustain it.
Bernier's message was that his minority government could make a better case at home if the United States would boost its own efforts in Afghanistan, according to Canadian and U.S. officials familiar with the conversation.
"I don't think he expected an express commitment that day that they would draw down in Iraq and buttress in Afghanistan," the Canadian official said. "But he certainly registered Canadian interest and that of the allies involved."
According to opinion polls, Canadians feel they have done their bit in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Stephen Harper last fall named an independent commission to study options -- continuing the combat mission, redeploying to more peaceful regions, or withdrawing in January 2009. The commission report, due this month, will form the basis of an upcoming parliamentary debate.
With a Taliban offensive expected in the spring, along with another record opium poppy crop, the new Marines will deploy to the British area in Helmand and will be available to augment Canadian forces in neighboring Kandahar.
Both President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates have toned down their public pressure on allies. When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Bush at his Texas ranch in November, U.S. and German officials said, she told him that while Bonn would step up its contribution in quiet northern Afghanistan, any change in Germany's noncombat role would spell political disaster for her conservative government.
"It's not an excuse; it's simply reality -- coalition reality and domestic reality," a German official said. Merkel came away with Bush's pledge to praise Germany's efforts and stop criticizing.
Although Gates began a meeting of NATO defense ministers late last year by saying he would not let them "off the hook" for their responsibilities in Afghanistan, he said in a news conference at the end of the session that further public criticism was not productive.
Still, the Defense Department hopes that increasing its own contribution -- nearly half of an additional 7,500 troops Gates has said are needed in Afghanistan -- will encourage the allies. "As we're considering digging even deeper to make up for the shortfall in Afghanistan," Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said, "we would expect our allies in the fight to do the same."
Many Europeans believe that the United States committed attention and resources to Iraq at Afghanistan's expense. But U.S. officials say the problems of NATO countries in Afghanistan have roots in not investing sufficiently in their militaries after the Cold War. Canada, U.S. officials say, needs American military airlift for its troops in Afghanistan because it got rid of a fleet of heavy lift helicopters.
At the same time that they want more from their partners, however, U.S. defense officials often disdain their abilities. No one, they insist, is as good at counterinsurgency as the U.S. military.
U.S. and British forces have long derided each other's counterinsurgency tactics. In Iraq, British commanders touted their successful "hearts and minds" efforts in Northern Ireland, tried to replicate them in southern Iraq, and criticized more heavy-handed U.S. operations in the north. Their U.S. counterparts say they are tired of hearing about Northern Ireland and point out that British troops largely did not quell sectarian violence in the south.
The same tensions have emerged in Afghanistan, where U.S. officials criticized what one called a "colonial" attitude that kept the British from retaining control over areas wrested from the Taliban. Disagreement leaked out publicly early last year when British troops withdrew from the Musa Qala district of Helmand after striking a deal with local tribal leaders. The tribal chiefs quickly relinquished control to the Taliban.
Britain, with a higher percentage of its forces deployed worldwide than the United States, is stretched thin in Afghanistan. Not only did the British have insufficient force strength to hold conquered territory, but the reconstruction and development assistance that was supposed to consolidate military gains did not arrive.
"It's worth reminding the Americans that the entire British army is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps," said one sympathetic former U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
After 10 months of Taliban control, Musa Qala was retaken in December in combat involving British, Afghan and U.S. forces. The new Marine deployments will supplement British troops, and both sides insist they have calmed their differences. "Whatever may or may not have been said between the two in the past," said one British official, ". . . we are now in the same place."
Now, he said, "the much more interesting question is where do we go from here, and can we sustain a cautiously positive picture in Musa Qala" and elsewhere.
British officials hope that new deployments and stepped-up Afghan security training by the Marines will address one of Helmand's biggest problems -- the expansion of the opium crop. Opium provides income for the Taliban and is a major source of corruption within the Afghan police and government, yet the allies are divided on how to stop its production.
U.S. officials in Afghanistan, led by Ambassador William B. Wood, have insisted that the current strategy of manually destroying opium fields is ineffective and have pressed to begin aerial spraying of herbicide. Wood is a former ambassador to Colombia, where the United States funds and operates the world's largest aerial effort to eradicate coca.
The British, in charge of NATO's anti-narcotics program in Afghanistan, strongly oppose spraying, as does Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who last month formally ruled it out over U.S. objections. But the government's preferred method of manual eradication -- sending Afghan troops and police to pull poppy plants out of the ground -- has faltered because of poor security.
More important, programs to provide rural Afghans with alternative income sources remain underfunded and poorly coordinated. Each of NATO's regional Afghan commands operates its own provincial reconstruction teams, and scores of nongovernmental organizations work in the country. But with few exceptions -- such as Khost province under U.S. command in the east, where military and reconstruction resources are meshed -- they share no overriding strategy or operational rules.
The United States has pressed U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to appoint a high-level representative to coordinate non-military activities in Afghanistan. Karzai has resisted, and Ban is said to be worried about taking responsibility for what he sees as a worsening situation.
Staff writers Thomas E. Ricks and Colum Lynch contributed to this report.
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
The Marine deployment is official.
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48669
The MEU part will be under ISAF but the training battalion will be under Operation Enduring Freedom (I infer the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan in this case;
http://www.cstc-a.com/
the combat side of Enduring Freedom is Combined Joint Task Force - 82).
http://www.cjtf82.com/
No precise location for the basing of the two different units is given; maybe the trainers will actually be stationed in Kabul at Camp Eggers--or at least be part of US training activities in the Kabul area.
http://www.cstc-a.com/Newcomers.html
The MEU's
Mark
Ottawa
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48669
The MEU part will be under ISAF but the training battalion will be under Operation Enduring Freedom (I infer the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan in this case;
http://www.cstc-a.com/
the combat side of Enduring Freedom is Combined Joint Task Force - 82).
http://www.cjtf82.com/
No precise location for the basing of the two different units is given; maybe the trainers will actually be stationed in Kabul at Camp Eggers--or at least be part of US training activities in the Kabul area.
http://www.cstc-a.com/Newcomers.html
The MEU's
Mark
Ottawa
- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 210
I understand from the comments of the White House speaker
they come under Canadian command,is this a first?.
Regards
they come under Canadian command,is this a first?.
Regards
Right on.
Now, this is my interpretation of things- please someone correct me if they're off.
Currently the established battlegroups in Helmand and Kandahar are doing a pretty decent job of holding their ground, and expanding slowly one district at a time with ANA assistance. However, overall efforts in RC South are hampered by the lack of a sizeable, territorially uncommitted manoeuvre element that could deployed as a sort of Thor's Hammer against targets of opportunity; smashing the enemy against the anvils of the existing BGs. As this Marine force is being touted as a 'one time' deployment for 6 or 7 months, it would likely be used as such to bring some decisive offencive operations to the enemy possibly on a scale we've not been able to manage before and hopefully draw enemy attention away fropm the areas we're currently operating in?
Obviously this is pretty speculative, but for the proposed duration of the deployment, it strikes me that a manoeuvre battalion to be used at the discretion of Comd. RC South probably makes the most sense for this force...
EDIT TO ADD:
If I'm not mistaken, an American infantry force (Company size I think?) was under the command of LCol Hope for some time in 2006, I believe about the same time as they were operating in Nawa and Garmser... I know there's a few guys here who can confirm or contradict this for me if I'm incorrect.
Major General Lessard takes over command of RC South in February. As such, any U.S. forces as part of R.C. South under ISAF should be under his command. That may well be a first for an American force of that size in a conflict of this intensity within recent history.
Now, this is my interpretation of things- please someone correct me if they're off.
Currently the established battlegroups in Helmand and Kandahar are doing a pretty decent job of holding their ground, and expanding slowly one district at a time with ANA assistance. However, overall efforts in RC South are hampered by the lack of a sizeable, territorially uncommitted manoeuvre element that could deployed as a sort of Thor's Hammer against targets of opportunity; smashing the enemy against the anvils of the existing BGs. As this Marine force is being touted as a 'one time' deployment for 6 or 7 months, it would likely be used as such to bring some decisive offencive operations to the enemy possibly on a scale we've not been able to manage before and hopefully draw enemy attention away fropm the areas we're currently operating in?
Obviously this is pretty speculative, but for the proposed duration of the deployment, it strikes me that a manoeuvre battalion to be used at the discretion of Comd. RC South probably makes the most sense for this force...
EDIT TO ADD:
time expired said:
If I'm not mistaken, an American infantry force (Company size I think?) was under the command of LCol Hope for some time in 2006, I believe about the same time as they were operating in Nawa and Garmser... I know there's a few guys here who can confirm or contradict this for me if I'm incorrect.
Major General Lessard takes over command of RC South in February. As such, any U.S. forces as part of R.C. South under ISAF should be under his command. That may well be a first for an American force of that size in a conflict of this intensity within recent history.
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
time expired: From Feb. 28, 2006, US forces in Regional Command South were under Canadian command (BGEN David Fraser) for nine months, as part of Enduring Freedom and then from July 31 under ISAF.
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2006/02/afstan-canadian-officers-t_114115588468095379.html
http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/newsroom/view_news_e.asp?id=1863
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=63b93669-64f0-4a0a-95b5-920632d6f3ea&k=76096
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/lf/English/6_1_1.asp?id=1409
Mark
Ottawa
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2006/02/afstan-canadian-officers-t_114115588468095379.html
http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/newsroom/view_news_e.asp?id=1863
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=63b93669-64f0-4a0a-95b5-920632d6f3ea&k=76096
http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/lf/English/6_1_1.asp?id=1409
Mark
Ottawa
- Reaction score
- 7,746
- Points
- 1,360
From today's Pentagon briefing,
(....)
Q Do you know whether this MEU is going as a MEU with the package, with its own air and so forth, or not?
Press Secretary Geoff Morrell: That's a good question and maybe something you can -- we'll get you an answer on. My original understanding was that this was a MAGTF and it would have its own air and ground, but we can certainly get a more firm answer for you. I can tell you the MEU will be, as I mentioned, in RC South, therefore under ISAF command. The Canadians are taking over there from the Brits in February of this year, so they will be operating most immediately under Canadian command in RC South. And as I mentioned, it's also a maneuver force so it has the flexibility to move wherever in Regional Command South that the Canadians deem is necessary to go after the enemy. I mean, this is a fighting force that will greatly enhance the capabilities of the Canadians and our allies who are down there taking it to the enemy.
(....)
(....)
Q Do you know whether this MEU is going as a MEU with the package, with its own air and so forth, or not?
Press Secretary Geoff Morrell: That's a good question and maybe something you can -- we'll get you an answer on. My original understanding was that this was a MAGTF and it would have its own air and ground, but we can certainly get a more firm answer for you. I can tell you the MEU will be, as I mentioned, in RC South, therefore under ISAF command. The Canadians are taking over there from the Brits in February of this year, so they will be operating most immediately under Canadian command in RC South. And as I mentioned, it's also a maneuver force so it has the flexibility to move wherever in Regional Command South that the Canadians deem is necessary to go after the enemy. I mean, this is a fighting force that will greatly enhance the capabilities of the Canadians and our allies who are down there taking it to the enemy.
(....)
- Reaction score
- 147
- Points
- 710
milnewstbay: Thanks to your comment, a post at The Torch ;D:
Marine combat troops in Afstan will be under overall Canadian command
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2008/01/marine-combate-troops-in-afstan-will-be.html
Mark
Ottawa
Marine combat troops in Afstan will be under overall Canadian command
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2008/01/marine-combate-troops-in-afstan-will-be.html
Mark
Ottawa
- Reaction score
- 1
- Points
- 410
Of these 3000 how many "boots outside the wire" will there be?
TangoTwoBravo
Army.ca Veteran
- Reaction score
- 3,765
- Points
- 1,110
Brihard said:
An American infantry company and some other assets were indeed under Canadian command as part of TF Orion for roughly two weeks in Jul 06. There were Brits mixed in as well from time to time. At times Canadians were under the US company commander and we had guys cut over to the Brits for a bit. It all worked well from my point of view, even if it was hard to keep track sometimes. I suppose that the US battalion in Zabul was also under a Canadian (as part of RC South). In turn, that Canadian had an American boss in Bagram for a while and then a British boss in Kabul. Multi-national at fairly low levels seems to be the norm these days.
In any case, additional troops will be a good thing as the RC South commander can add forces to a problem area without necessarily robbing them from another.
I imagine that a proportion of those 3000 will be in support roles. It is the cost of doing business. Even the Spartans had CSS.
- Reaction score
- 66
- Points
- 530
The 24 MEU as the article outlines will have its BLT[battalion landing team] which will conduct offensive operations.There will be a second battalion from the 7th Marines [I think it is] that will be involved in training the ANA. The MEU with its own air assets will be a self contained package capable of performing any mission that will be assigned. Marine rifle battalions are larger than those in the Army with Marine rifle companies of around 185 men each so the commander will have a very robust force available. Another plus is that the unit's personnel have seen combat in Iraq.
daftandbarmy
Army.ca Fossil
- Reaction score
- 44,577
- Points
- 1,160
Oh yes Mr. Gates, this should encourage NATO to welcome the Marines with open arms. My God, what an idiot...
+++++++++++++
Gates faults NATO force in southern Afghanistan
The U.S. Defense secretary says he thinks the soldiers from Canada, Britain and the Netherlands do not know how to fight a guerrilla insurgency.
By Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 16, 2008
WASHINGTON -- In an unusual public criticism, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he believes NATO forces currently deployed in southern Afghanistan do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency, a deficiency that could be contributing to the rising violence in the fight against the Taliban.
"I'm worried we're deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations," Gates said in an interview.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usafghan16jan16,1,163569.story?track=rss
+++++++++++++
Gates faults NATO force in southern Afghanistan
The U.S. Defense secretary says he thinks the soldiers from Canada, Britain and the Netherlands do not know how to fight a guerrilla insurgency.
By Peter Spiegel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 16, 2008
WASHINGTON -- In an unusual public criticism, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said he believes NATO forces currently deployed in southern Afghanistan do not know how to combat a guerrilla insurgency, a deficiency that could be contributing to the rising violence in the fight against the Taliban.
"I'm worried we're deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I'm worried we have some military forces that don't know how to do counterinsurgency operations," Gates said in an interview.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-usafghan16jan16,1,163569.story?track=rss
