Let’s be clear; it is not my intent to comment politically in this column (unless I say as much in my opening lines!).  My purpose here is to discuss military operations in Afghanistan, and PURELY from a military perspective.

I will not not focus on any of the humanitarian or civilian aspects, except where they directly impact military operations, as this is not my area of expertise. However, what rather amuses (and deeply troubles) me is how little bloggers and others appear to actually LOOK at military operations, what they can, and cannot do, and the variety of methods that can be used to achieve a military goal, some successful, some less so, and some that are abysmal failures.

Up until the past year, we have been essentially doing nothing but a ‘holding’ program in Afghanistan while the focus was on Iraq. This essentially was a combination of the old ‘fire-base’ concept from Vietnam (which didn’t work there either!), and very small-scale ‘search and destroy’ missions by special forces backed up by enormous airpower. Most, if not all of those kind of missions end up with a LOT of collateral damage (the whole concept of the Airforce ‘winning hearts and minds’ through wildly destructive airstrikes is a fallacy that should have been driven out of the military repertoire a long time ago!), which has done little but drive the people into the arms of the Taliban. In reality, the only thing that can be said for this kind of operation is that it is relatively cheap in terms of manpower and resources, which had been the watchword for the Bush administration from the beginning. And for years, everyone in the civilian world has been running around throwing up their hands at the situation as if no other military strategy/policy was possible, and therefore the whole exercise was doomed from the beginning…

Of course that is simply not true, and Obama was WISE enough to know this, and THOUGHTFUL enough to get a range of opinions on different options, and CAREFUL enough to make sure the planning was THOROUGH and COMPREHENSIVE from all angles BEFORE launching the new strategy. Such things take time, and is a partial reason why Obama did not simply ‘throw more troops’ at the problem immediately, like all the Republicans, Tea Party ‘know-nothings,’ and media pundits wanted to see. NOT dithering, just PLANNING! You might recall, when we did the first Gulf war, it took six months worth of gathering troops and planning before the war actually launched, and ‘on-going diplomatic efforts’ had little to do with it…..

The public has little, or no knowledge of military operations, strategy, tactics, how they work, or not, and apparently, little inclination to learn either (they certainly can’t get any of this kind of knowledge from the media, which apparently has even less knowledge than the public they supposedly serve!). Really, it’s too bad, because such knowledge is FUNDAMENTAL to understand what is going on in Afghanistan now, or for that matter, any other war we happen to get ourselves into!  The military conducts operations by ART, and by SCIENCE, and is the result of long study, wide experience, and deep knowledge of the capabilities of weapons, weapon systems tactics, and history.  But make no mistake, the military is constrained in its operations by what is made available to it, the missions ‘allowed’ by Washington and politics, and thus does the best that it can do, given the conditions it has to work with.

I have YET to see a single media piece that dealt with any sort of strategic, operational, or tactical analysis, just endless reports of miserable Afghans crying over dead bodies or blown-up houses. Yes, war is a terrible thing, and it always has been. But there is a RIGHT way to conduct it, and a WRONG way too, and if they don’t know the difference, how can people come to any judgement as to whether it will be successful or not?

The current operations in Afghanistan differ SIGNIFICANTLY from those which have gone before, and it is my intent to discuss these at some length in future articles, and it is my hope that you will all hang on for the ride, as by these tactics and methodologies, we will either win, or lose in Afghanistan, with all the fall-out that this entails.