I am in a position to have heard a lot of comments from NSWC types that regular American U. S. Army troops are more often than not physically unfit for the type of operations common in Afghanistan, in fact no small number are actually overweight (military weight standards not civilian). Indeed, this would seem to be one area that could be addressed cheaply and effectively prior to deployment by very intensive and demanding stamina training. My guess is that McChrystal is probably in superior physical condition than the vast bulk of his troops twenty-five years younger than him.

FITNESS:
I don’t know where they are training troops prior to shipping them to Afghanistan, but sticking them in the Rockies to work on endurance and getting some “mountain muscles” in their legs might be helpful. Acclimating at 8,000–11,000 feet helps you to breath thinner air and humping upand down the slopes with a ruck on your back conditions the muscles.

CONTINUITY:
If a commander were to maintain a log or diary of all the little stuff about his AO and pass it along to his replacement, it’d go a long way toward fixing this problem. Not the kind of things that make it into reports, but stuff like “Mustafa owns the fruit stand. His wife’s name is Fatima. They have a 12-year old girl named Zena and a 9 year old boy named Mohammad. Never had any problems with them. Mohammad is a bright kid. Wants to be a mullah when he grows up.” This is the same kind of information that salesmen keep about their customers and, believe it or not, every Westerner over there is a salesman. SGT Pepper can be a good salesman or a bad salesman, but he’s still a salesman.

OWNING THE NIGHT:
In order to own the night, you have to be out in the night. I’ve gotten the impression that at both Wanat and Keating no one was outside the wire at night. If you’re not out there, you can’t disrupt the enemy’s movement which means that he, not you, will definitely own that piece of the night.

UNDERESTIMATING THE ENEMY:
This is a big one and we never seem to learn. In Vietnam, a large number of VC and NVA had fought with the Viet Minh for years, then just kept on fighting us. In Afghanistan, they’ve been fighting since when? The ‘70s? Many of the Taliban have been fighting on their own ground for their entire adult lives. PFC Smith or CAPT Jones might be a good guy but a couple years of training and a tour in Iraq doesn’t give them the same tactical experience as Abdulla, who’s been fighting since he was 14 and is now their age, has. Respect that. You don’t have to like him but you need to respect the fact that he knows his little sliver of the world a whole lot better than you do. The time may come when you’ll appreciate what you’ve learned by watching him and fighting him.

WEAPONS:
MK 19s would be nice to have on patrol but try humping one up and down mountains on foot — at 130+ lbs. for the gun and tripod and 40-60 lbs. for a single belt of ammunition, it’s impractical. And if it’s sitting down with the vehicles it doesn’t do any good. Sounds good for mounted patrols, though. Problem is, the bad guys may not accommodate your desire to drive to work. It might be good to carry something with a little more punch than a SAW, though. M60s worked pretty well back in the day.

EMPLOY THE LOCALS:
I’d suggest a new acronym: MBK for “mosque building kit.” Building a nice spiffy new mosque for them might help capture hearts and minds.

It’s really good to see this kind of “lessons learned” being developed, though.

I will third the physical fitness (especially in the thin air) and add in a complaint. US Army standards for physical fitness have not dropped, but in an attempt to retain more Soldiers, a lot of those standards are being waived.

Soldiers are not required to pass their physical fitness test after basic training--instead, they are given one year from basic training to pass their physical fitness test. News flash: if they couldn't pass after constant physical training and closely monitored diets in basic, they certainly will not once they have the freedom to eat ice cream and guzzle soda and beer.

It's also increasingly difficult to chapter these Soldiers out of the military for obesity and PT failures. I literally saw troops that were 80-100 lbs overweight.

One thing we did in Upstate NY (10th MTN) was a survival exercise at Lake Placid in the winter. We hiked up one of the mountains with a pretty good load in our rucksacks, and then navigated down as buddy teams with our GPS (to simulate a shootdown environment). It was physically challenging (particularly with the snow and ice), and great fun.

Perhaps as a lifelong civilian I lack the experience to know why this problem has been such a difficult one to solve.

Sending in a replacement unit a month or so before its predecessor departs its area of operations and sending in its commander and senior officers early both seem to me good ways of avoiding wheel reinvention. Even the log idea mentioned above would help (though there is no guarantee that such logs would be read, and written briefings are rarely adequate substitutes for being there).

Have none of these ideas been tried over the last eight years? I understand the pressure to maintain regular deployments schedules, pressure that arises for both good (logistics) and bad (habit) reasons. I'm sure it's true as well that in the early years of the Afghan war few military leaders thought we'd be doing this going into the winter of 2009. My admittedly limited understanding of counterinsurgency doctrine, however, leads me to believe that wheel reinvention is probably not just a bad thing, but a very bad thing -- because it hurts the war effort, and because it doesn't seem that hard not to do.

Th enlisted have learned that they are being sent to the graveyard of Afghanistan to fight and die for the criminal puppet Karzai and his lucrative heroin cartel.

The Afghanistan people hate them completely and want to see them killed and mutiliated. The Afghan "Army" will betray their plans to the Taliban and shoot them in the back. They will never accept the invader/occupier of their land.

Their senior officers do not care about them at all. They only care about impressing their higher ups for promotion, cush assignments, and high paying jobs in the arms industry.

Afghanistan is page 14 news to most Americans and they pay no attention at all to what is going on there. The majority of Americans can not even find it on a map. They are broke, in debt and one pay check away from financial disaster. Afghanistan is the last thing on their minds. Iraq is ancient history.

The DC politicians and pentagon gangsters only pay lip service to their sacrafice, and use them as pawns for their own greedy motives. Same goes for the corrupt "Think Tank" propaganda parisites. They look at the enlisted as "Fly over" trailer trash, while laughing all the way to the to a belt way booze and hooker party. Their bank accounts are swelling with enlisted blood.

The enlisted are blamed for failure, and officers will take all the credit they can for themselves, adding as much ribbon and tin to their uniforms as will fit on their puffed up chests, while mutiliated enlisted men and women waste away in VA hospital wards for decades to come, completely forgotten.

The biggest lesson learned is to get out alive and protect your friends. Self preservation is the name of the game. Do not trust officers at all costs. Only trust fellow enlisted.

How 'bout the old lesson: 'never fight a land war in Asia'? Or the one that flows naturally from Afghanistan's well-earned sobriquet "The Graveyard of Empires."

Tactical lessons flow freely without a moment's attention to the overarching strategic question: what the hell are we doing there? Stuck. Never retreat. But sometime we either need to wind this thing backwards or face a generation of woe with no meaningful goal in sight. Tactics schmactics: it's national interest that's missing. What the hell are we doing there?

Acknowledge that our rotations are too short. 6, 8, 12 or even 16 months is a blip in Afghan time. Anthony James Joes wrote that we didn't lose the Vietnam War but lost it 10 times. In other words, with every successive rotation critical knowledge was lost. ok that horse has been beaten to death...

The word on the street (back in '06) was that it was pointless to deal with the Americans 'cause they are gonna leave anyway.

One way to mitigate is to build continuity with an eye towards depth rather than breadth. To expand on the salesman analogy above, also figure out who the guy's family was and where they are now. Details, yes it is all in the details.

Rapport- it astounds me to this day that guys are not used to working with interpreters and I'm talking about guys with multiple tours. Even after dealing with revolving door of Americans, Afghans are a patient bunch but when a guy is coming into their home/work and always fumbling around with the 'terp, guess who looks dumb? Ok the American will not look good but the 'terp loses credibility/face 'cause they still consider him "one" of them. Each time you (and your 'terp) won't be so readily believed and that kind of rep will get around. Also bigotry is still a big thing there- no matter how perfect your interpreter may be, the local shopkeeper might not be as tolerant as us EEO-schooled yankees. Employ a few 'terps of different backgrounds/ethnicities to be used as needed. Finally, I know the force pro guys will make a stink about that but tell them it is good OPSEC to have a bunch of Afghans who you randomly select for the day and/or halfday.

The length of the deployments is not nearly as problematic as the fact that units are not returning to the same AO and often do not even know which AO they will be going to until they are halfway through their train-up. Contrast this with SOF units that return to the same AO, so they are able to monitor activity in country for the mission set that they will inherit and maintain communication with the unit in-country. When they deploy, they often fall in on the same team house, AOB, FOB, etc, that they operated from several months earlier. Rather than meeting locals for the first time, they are catching up on old times. Once we have fewer Brigades dedicated to Iraq, it seems that the CF should be able to arrange a similar rotation.

In regard to physical fitness - the Army needs to change its ways. Most units' PT programs reflect an obsession with weight control and a fetish for distance running. Being skinny and fast in a set of IPFUs doesn't translate into the ability to hump 100 pounds of lightweight gear up and down a mountain. Units that conduct combat-focused physical conditioning and conduct well-structured PT programs are the exception. The norm, unfortunately, is for a unit to just fill up time for an hour following reveille with a workout that has no coherent relation to what was done the day prior or what will occur on the following day.

Glad to see I'm not the only one confused and puzzled by our goals in Afghanistan. I suspect future analysts will see wisdom in Obama's serious consideration of national strategy there (reinforced by the right's rabid rants agin it, a sure sign of the correct path...).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/26/AR2009102603394.html?hpid=topnews

8 years and counting and the military is still trying to figure out what to do.

I have never seen so many ignorant and bone headed posts (not all) in my life.

The only question regarding Afghanistan is: Why are we still there?

Clueless goobers at the top of the military and civilian leadership is my choice for the answer.

Doesn't matter anyway. The gravity of economics, politics and the Taliban fighters will help bring this fools errand to close soon enough.

Interesting comment on this. In Iraq (2005-2006) the Mk19 was regarded as nothing but rapid fire collateral damage waiting to happen. All our Hummvees had M2 50 cals, M249 SAWs, or M240Bs on them. The MK19s we had never made it out of the arms room. I agree with the above post that MK19s would be useless on a foot patrol. I'd guess that the Officer that posted this advice was probably stationed down south where it is flatter and mounted patrols would be more useful.

This may not be popular but I believe we need to stop rotating units into and out of Afghanistan and instead go back to the old way of replacing individual Soldiers. This would allow us to establish the continuity of Command where ever we have our forces deployed.

No! Twice no! No, no, no, I say TRut. I lived Vietnam (multiple tours). It creates poor unit cohesion; small unit leaders don't know their people's foibles; lack of trust among the small units, and creates too many non-effectives that never make it over as replacements, for various reasons (sick, lame, and lazy), but never-the-less, count as part of a command's end strength.

Continuity of command can be accomplished in other ways, which I won't go into.

This is the ur-text on unit cohesion in Vietnam. The occasional Shy Meyer aside, it's tough to find Army leadership since then paying any attention to Vietnam's lesson's: http://books.google.com/books?id=exrKcYVjejgC&pg=PA33&lpg=PA33&dq=unit+cohesion+savage&source=bl&ots=aqgNzPy3GU&sig=Y6OBWZk11OFxN7gr75lOd_GwiH4&hl=en&ei=RHboSp7LO4aGtgfjwrTzBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=unit%20cohesion%20savage&f=false