By the way, Bill Lind (one of Boyd’s acolytes) has published a draft of his counterinsurgency manual. It’s slyly called FMFM 3-25 and is posted here. I’ll probably be working his thoughts into my thesis. Blue skies! — Dan Ford

(I am a late-blooming student in War Studies at King’s College London. My classmates were mostly majors in the British Army, with a sprinkling from other services and some civilians from around the world. Thus the dissertation, 55 years after I got my B.A.)

Rumsfeld, thinking that the military brass were too conventional in thinking, in strategy, in goals, in operations, in procurement, etc. revolutionized more of the Pentagon than anyone ever, and was clearly the best SecDef ever. Accounts of the days after Sept 11 and of the invasion of Iraq relate that he ripped up battle plan after battle plan for being too conventional.
He –without the backing of the joint chiefs–was interested in changing the metrics, the methods, the tactics, the strategies our forces used. He reached out to every other nation to builda world wide network to fight the islamists, and truly enlisted all of NATO, and created new relationships
with dozens of other nations, enlarging our allied relationships at every turn, utilizing whatever he couldto create cohesion.

Yet he did it without ever firing an active commander.

My guess is he knew how poorly that would play with the military command and with rank and file,
and he actually understoodthe chain of command quite well. So he worked with them, demanding more of them, demandingcreative work, creative results, pushing pushing to the limit. He wanted them to tell him something he hadn’t thought of himself.
And when they didn’t want to work with him, he let them retire.

Now, of course, the generals hated him (for it), and they kept attacking and attacking until they destroyed him–though they did destroy themselves
in the process.One way that they did that was by screaming to anyone who would listen that MORE TROOPS were needed–as if Rumsfeld, not Bush, were the limiting factor on troops. But they didn’t really want more troops. “we’d need 350k” was a sentence spoken to shut down political pressure for the military to do something. They didn’t really envisionit happening, and of course, they weren’t going to do anything interesting with the additional troops anyway.

Rumsfeld over and over again was about the nonconventional methods but he still went to war with the generals he had. He didn’t intervene (did he?) to move Petraeus to the center stage out of Kansas, even though (didn’t he?) he must have known about his successes in Iraq. When the Surge finally camee it was wrongly described publicly
as a change in troop numbers, not in tactics, but Petraeus’ elevation meant those old generals that hated Rumsfeld were mostly marginalized, not elevated, so they got what was coming.

And now here’s Gates and McChrystal. They don’t want to do any interesting counterinsurgency work different thanMcKieran was doing. They want to standardize the fight despite McKieran doing what one would expect–having autonomy
for different regions, and fighting appropriately differently accordingly. They don’t want new battle plans that work with NATO.
They want the old ones, and they don’t want to rethink the ROE, just limit it . They want a politically astutue fellow to do what they want.

And they were willing to publicly fire a general to get it.

The antithesis of Rumsfeld, no?

Will the troops love McChrystal?

I’m sending the link to some friends. Bill Whittle was first to bring Boyd to my attention, but your thesis fills in a lot of the picture.

Seems you have a few titles for us to investigate – judging from your writing sample, it will be most gratifying.

I do not disagree in any way. I guess what I was trying to say is this:

Af-Pak is a tarbaby of the worst sort because we can do one of two things:
1. Kick it’s ass then RUN!. IOW, do the Conan thing and leave them with the lamentations of their women.
OR
2. Go in for the whole enchilada and do what Petraeus (I think) would do. Hearts and minds and city councils. Civilian security. Military security. All in Af. and hoping the zeitgeist spills to the neighborhood.

However, what we do have is feckless children of the CCCP playing at world politics. They are only in it for the photo-ops not the notion that they may have some adult level responsibilities to those ramen in Af-Pak.

I cannot use the appropriate superlatives, as our language must match the rules of Wretchard’s house; but please, finish this analysis. I learned much about Boyd that I had not encountered before, and I look forward to the analysis of how his work can be applied to the current war.

Also, since I am more than enamored of the AVG, I suspect I am going to have to find money to budget for a few books on your sidebar. As a kid who is of Chinese ancestry, the idea of Americans volunteering to help a free China defend itself was dear to my heart. [yeah, I know now it was more complex than that] That, and one of my favorite teachers in high school was a Chinese member of their ground crews who immigrated after the war.

Subotai Bahadur

For a guffaw and a chuckle (I can’t guarantee an actual belly laugh) check my slumbering blog for the post of Tuesday, August 24, 2004 “Remember Gravitas?

(That was in the days before I swore off listening to the network alleged “news” casts.)

The roads are so littered with enemy bombs that nearly all transport and resupply to this base occurs by helicopter. The pilots roar through the darkness, swoop into small bases nestled in the saddle of enemy territory, and quickly rumble off into the night.

A witness must spend only a short time in the darkness to know we are at war. Flares arc into the night, or mortar illumination rounds drift and swing under parachutes, orange and eerily in the distance, casting long, flickering but sharply defined shadows. The worst that can happen is that you will be caught in an open field, covered by nothing and concealed only by darkness, when the illumination suddenly bathes you in light. Best is to stay low and freeze and prepare to fire, or in the case of a writer, to stay low and freeze and prepare to watch the firing.

Explosions from unknown causes rumble through the cool nights while above drifts the Milky Way, punctuated by more shooting stars than one can remember. The Afghanistan nights will grant a wish to wish upon a shooting star. And while waiting for the next meteor, the eyes are likely to catch tracer bullets.
—

The ramp lifts in preparation for takeoff and the halo begins to rematerialize before the helicopter lifts into the darkness and disappears. Soldiers call the medevac flights to Camp Bastion, “Nightingales” or “Nightingale flights.” Shortly after sunrise on the morning of 13 August, an element from this unit was ambushed nearby, killing three and wounding two others. Despite the immediate danger, the helicopter came straight onto the battlefield.

After the initial ambush, and another successful ambush during the evacuation, the British soldiers did not return to base but continued with the mission. Later that evening they were twice ambushed again, sustaining more fatalities as two interpreters were killed. Soldiers asked me to go on that mission but I was busy assembling this dispatch. One of the killed soldiers, shortly before the mission, had looked over my shoulder as I selected the photos. Captain Mark Hale was killed while aiding a wounded soldier. Mark had particularly liked the next three images:
—
Epilogue:

The following men and women sacrificed their lives in Afghanistan since the time that Benjamin Kopp and Joseph Etchells passed on. I am told that more names will soon be added to the list: