Bigduke6

What strikes me is how CLEAN the Germans are. I know, Teutons are nuts about clean in any case, but it's like there's a German Army law that says no dust may ever stick to a uniform. The German infantry appears to be far more fastidious than its Anglo-Saxon counterparts, or perhaps they spruce up especially well for the photogs, or they are just maybe not walking and sweating so very often.

Classic. Thanks for the post. FSU transport pilots as a rule are grizzled middled-aged guys with thousands of hours of stick time, 3,000 hours and by them you're still green. Those guys, they know the limits of their aircraft down to the last bolt and meter. Actually Elmar, for the record Il-76 is supposed to have relatively good cross-country performance, it has reinforced gear and it's all in the belly of the plane, so supposedly shear forces aren't so bad. I've seen Ilushins take off from a concrete slab/ice/snow mixture that would be too rough and bumpy - almost - to X-country ski across. Il-76 is supposedly a really solid planes, I've only heard pilots say positive stuff about them.

C3K, I get what you're saying but here's my two dirhams: - Humans inside of buildings, as opposed to humans out in the open, have lots of extra cover from frag (walls, furniture, etc.) and being humans they will be very active indeed in finding that place that is safest from flying frag. - Buildings by their nature are stuffed with stuff, and stuff intercepts frag. - Pretty much all buildings have not just roof but attics of some kind, that's an extra layer of protection you may not be taking into account. - Buildings are relatively large relative to humans, and humans (see intitial point) have a real tendency to make themselves small when things are going splodey on the building they're in. So just because a shell hits a building with a human inside it, doesn't mean the frag has a great statistical chance of hitting a human. - Buildings very frequently have small spots that are especially good for hiding from explosions and fragmentation, for instance basements, bathtubs, interior closets, etc. Obviously, if the building collapses you have a better chance of harming the humans inside of it, but personally I would be careful not to underestimate the ability of humans to try and stay alive, most of them will suprise you with how imaginative thay can be when it comes to figuring out a way to avoid death. Personally, I think CMSF artillery is overly effective, when main gun rounds hit squads out in the open it might as well be nerve gas. I find that if they're inside buildings CMSF infantry tends to get cut down over a very short time if there's a single roof over them, which is not right in my book, I would assume people under fire in a building would generally survive a short bombardment; and for practical purposes all CMSF fires are short bombardments. But on the other hand CMSF soldiers with a whole floor between them and the booms, say they're on the first floor of a two story building, seem to survive very well indeed; and me I think that's excellent simulation. Matter of taste of course, but if it were up to me I would dial down artillery effectiveness in the game, those nerve gas main gun rounds really fry my grits.

I think the dithering is more, they have behind closed doors concluded the war is unwinnable, that Afghanistan is unreformable, and that money given to Pakistan is money handed over to one of the most corrupt governments on the planet. I believe the US civilian leadership has concluded there is no solution in Afghanistan except failure. It is obvious to all the Americans lack the will and the resources to supress the Pathan tribes, never mind impose modern government on Afghanistan. Without the ability to do that, everything else is a bandaid on a punctured aorta. Since staying the course in Afghanistan was part of the Obama election platform, the only possible tactic for him now can be to pretend to be planning to do something, or doing something superficial, while actually dithering. I mean, even if Karzai agrees to a second ballot, and wins it even sort of cleanly, is the Afghanistan government going to be more legitimate? Maybe in the eyes of the foreign community, but for sure not in the eyes of the Pathans, and they are the players that count in this ball game. I assume that the "let's go civilian" when decoded really means "get the military out now, civilians are cheaper than the military and if things get really bad we have to face up to incompetent civilian foreign policy, rather than straightforward military defeat." Over and over during the Vietnam period you would here the flower children say over and over "Why don't we just declare a victory and get out? What if they gave a war and nobody came." Maybe the Americans will get it right this time, they'll just take their marbles and go home, and good riddance.

Point of history: The "irrelevant" reference most historians trace back to Harry G. Summers Jr. He was a squad leader during the Korean War, a battalion staff officer in the 1960s in Vietnam, and in 1974 - 75 he was part of the US delegation at the Paris Peace Talks, one part of which was US-Vietnamese negotiations on US POW returns. Summers was in Hanoi in April 1975 - this is about four months before the Red Vietnamese took Saigon - and he was chatting unofficially with his counterpart Colonel Nguyen Don Tu. According to Summers, the conversation went like this: US colonel: You know you never beat us on the battlefield. Vietnamese Colonel: (After a short pause) That may be so, but it is also irrelevant. Summers later wrote a book called On Strategy, recording the conversation. A main theme of Summers' book was that the US defeat in Vietnam was due primarily to a failute by US leadership to apply intelligent military strategy. Generally, the problem as Summers saw it was that the Americans started out with a flawed assumption (Indochina is gonna go Communist, better do something), and piled on error after error, most based either in willful ingnorance, or in wishful overestimation of what US military force could accomplish. Summers cited Colonel Tu to point out that winning battles does not necessarily win the war, as was assumed by pretty much the entire US leadership. (As a personal note I can add that the "We never lost a battle in Vietnam" became sort of a mantra among the US Army officer corps during the 1980s, it seemed like they felt that if they repeated it often enough, the Vietnam failure would magically disappear from the history books. As it happens I once even got in trouble with a brigade commander for disagreeing in public about US military performance in Vietnam, but my dissent seems to have done little to change the US Army group think.) To continue the famous quote sweepstakes can any one tell me who was it that said: "The first time history repeats itself it's a tragedy, and every time after that it's a farce." Voltaire? I may have the wording a bit wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's the general idea.

I think black is correct. http://tripatlas.com/videoplay/DwooeiK4mm4

Apocal, Well let me tell you a story. Way back when I was a young man I got hired by the Federal government to prevent the onslaught of Communist agression in Europe. The Army in its wisdom sent me to an infantry battalion, and one of my jobs was teaching our emigres from the block and the burbs, er, our young soldiers, about the Kalashnikov. So every year I would run a firing range, draw either 8 or a dozen (Romanian) AKes from brigade, a bunch of 7.62 x 39mm ammo (I think Serbia) from Corps, and we would have a fine old time familiarization firing. I ran that range four years in a row, we fired somthing like 15,000 rounds each time, and part of the training was not to clean or oil the weapons from firer to firer, the teaching points being that (a) you can pick it up and use it, it doesn't have to be zeroed to you and ( there is such a thing as an automatic rifle that can shoot without cleaning and oiling all the time. In those four years, not a single jam. Not one. There usually were 1-2 rounds that didn't fire in a day, you just cleared them and kept right on shooting. Sure US Army armorer were maintaining them in the interims, but we were only one battalion of about a half dozen or so waiting in turns to use these weapons; they got used pretty much continuously. As range officer, I got to play around with the extra ammunition. I learned: - 20 mags, absolute automatic, as fast as you can, it still shoots fine. (That wasn't just me pulling the trigger, I got volunteers) - Rain and temperatures have zero effect on the weapons performance. It just works all the time. - You can drop it off the back of a truck, or on concrete, and it works. - If you have 90 rounds and you're on semi taking your time you can put them all into a target the size of about an apple at 50 meters, easily. Further, and I wasn't in charge for this, I have seen a loaded AK buried in about 3 feet of dirt, the dirt watered with a hose, the AK excavated, and it fired on automatic without a hitch. I had less experience with the PKM but as I got on in life I met people who did, and unanimously the message is that the PKM is, if anything, more reliable than the AK. I don't want to give the impression that I think the AK is a war winner, no rifle is, but if the advertisement is it will shoot thousands of rounds w/o a jam, I for one am a believer.

It might be worth noting, that the AK is supposed to be able to fire thousands (something like 10 or 100, I forget) of rounds on cyclic before it gets a problem. You tell a soldier in an AK-armed military there are weapons out there that can't manage a 1000 before it's assumed they'll jam, and he'll tell you that's substandard. And of course if you are firing as fast as you can, you're either screwing around on a range or really, really need the weapon to keep functioning as the alternative option is really, really bad for your health. AKes unquestionably aren't quite as accurate as the M16 series at 300 - 500 m., actually I can vouch for that one personally. But in the opinion Mr. Kalashnikov, the extra accuracy and better-maching of the US weapons isn't worth the loss of reliability. Of course, if the US forces switched to a different weapon there would be all those sales of Break-Free fluid and gray toothbrushes to the Army that would become redundant, that's home front jobs we're talking about. And of course Colt is a pretty big employer too, and I bet they contribute to the political campaign here and there. So probably the boys are stuck with M4 for a while. It' s not a bad weapon, just it's design philosophy seems driven by firing ranges and computer modeling. And wouldn't it be cool if CMSF modeled troops in intense contact going cyclic, AND then jams? Of course to do it right you'd have to get a little audio of the pixel trooper saying something like !@#$%, my !@#$% weapon won't !@#$% work!

As it happens I have seen former Soviet armies fire AGS-17. Using both "tape" and "snail magazine" for the ammo. From what I have seen Alex is right, the standard "burst" seems to be about 5 rounds, not one or two. Which makes sense, if you're using the tape that makes two "bursts" and the crew knows you change the ribbon, simple, which is pretty much how the Russians do things. As to accuracy it seems like a normal trained crew with AGS-17 ought to be able to hit a stationary vehicle at about 300 or even 400 meters without too much trouble. It would take a bit of practice but it's far from impossible, a good crew I know is supposed to but the entire "burst" into a window at that range. That said, I think an AGS-17 crew would have to be pretty skillful to hit a moving vehicle at even half that distance, the shells are not bullets, it almost seems like the AGS-17 is sort of a hopped up pitching machine. A skilled crew I guess would be able to do it, but I would think your average crew would need 2-3 "bursts" to hit a moving target, and what with the need to change out the tapes, an inexperienced crew might well not have enough ammo to "range in" on a moving target. I can't really comment on the relative simulation of the Russian AGS-17 vs. the NATO Mk19 in CMSF, except to remind every one of the following nomenclature: CMBB, and ZiS-3. I know what I suspect, grumble grumble. Thanks to Alex on the info about the tapes, I didn't know you united three of them to fill the "snail magazine", stands to reason of course.

I agree that more often than not the insurgents attack bases and "fail", i.e., get repulsed with some to many insurgent casualties, and few or no blue casualties. The questions I keep coming back to are degree and intent. Sometimes when the insurgents do nothing but shoot up a post and get tons of HE called in on them, the point is just to demonstrate the insurgency is there, make the blues disrupt the peace with major HE, and maybe even to get rid of some expendable insurgents - these guys can be pretty ruthless. It seems however that there is in fact a trend where the insurgents are trying bigger operations and scoring more blue kills, especially as compared with one or two years ago. Just the other day, yesterday or the day before, they hit a post, killed I think 8 x ANA, and took off. That also didn't make the bigtime news. As to the LRAS3, the paratroopers at Wanat had it or something very similar to it, there was some kind of super-duper sensor system dismounted and operating at OP Topside. I'm speculating it was an LRAS3, but in any case they had something that could see dismounted dudes at 5 km., walking a mountain path in the dark. But without fire free rules, how do you tell whether it's insurgents or villagers transiting from "a" to "b"? Sure, maybe 90 per cent of the time it's insurgents, who walks in Afghanistan mountains in the dark? But it's calling in indirect on that 10 per cent that loses you the war, and the insurgents clearly know that too. At Wanat, the sensor thingie at OP Topside, whatever it was, got taken out in the initial RPG volleys. I assume the insurgents when they want to get overwatch over a US base use cover wherever possible - and they probably know down to a flea's eyelash what paths go into what LOS - where they can't use cover they simulate villagers. I also assume the insurgents would be smart enough to parade groups of old men or women or whatever at other locations, so the US sensors can pay attention to that and not the dudes setting up the dushka at the other end of the compass. The basic problem is that sure these sensors allow the blues to spot people moving around in the hills, but due to limited personnel and the steepness of the hills (hard to catch up to some guys in man jammies if you're wearing armor and humping ammo) the blues can't go up into the hills to check out every spot they get physically. The morale implications are interesting. If we worst case and assume the insurgents have a good understanding of how US sensor systems work, and personally I take that as a given, then every time they manipulate the US sensors, or show themselves to the US sensors knowing the US rules of engagement protect them, that's a psychological victory for the insurgents. Nothing raises morale like thumbing your nose with impunity at a better-equipped opponent. A little thing perhaps, but another bullet point in the answer to the question: Why won't these insurgents just give up, don't they know they can't win? As for the US side, there are probably no short-term morale implications, but longer term it gets interesting. At Wanat the paratroopers got what appeared to be dozens of spots in the night prior to the attack, it was quite clear there was a strangely large number of groups of individuals moving about the hills that night. The info got passed to higher, but what was higher supposed to do, order weapons free? So after the fight you get, at minimum, paratroopers extremely frustrated with the rules of engagement, as as far as they are concerned had they lit up those spots in the hills the night previous, their buddies still would be alive. Which under stress could turn into one or more of those paratrooopers saying "the heck with the rules of engagement" the next time around, and that of course is not a recipe to win hearts and minds. All of this is not to argue the blues are doomed or the insurgents are all-powerful. Rather, it is to argue the blues are working with some serious and perhaps even game-breaking restraints, and most of them are imposed by the type of war they are fighting, rather than the people the grunts normally blame, i.e., higher or the politicians. All of which leads me to wishing - again - CMSF had civilians in it and a way to dock the blues victory points for killing them by accident. That would be a heck of a simulation. (Yes Steve, I remember how hard something like that might be to program. But I can dream, can't I?)

Vanir, You're right, I didn't think of that, if the air is doing gun runs and supporting the base, they can't be out hunting retreating bad guys. For the record my point about the air not seeing any insurgents, is the logic that if they had, there would have been a lot more insurgent bodies found. One body we know where it was, on the wire next to OP Topside, the dude got hit by a claymore. Don't know about the second. Yet all those gun runs, heck, there was a B1A1 dropping precision-guided munitions at one point, and somehow out from under all that, the insurgents got away, with their dead AND wounded. Is the effect of air overestimated? (I think we all know the answer to that one.) Or are the insurgents really that good at getting their people out from under overwhelming US air superiority? It was day, it was clear, and once there was distance from US troops it was gunships weapons free. I agree the insurgent force was fairly large, but maybe another possibility is that they were not making an all out effort to kill Americans once they had blotted out OP Topside (prior to the Americans retaking it for a bit, of course). Rather, if one assumes the insurgents really really had their act together, you can make the case what happened was they hit OP Topside, kept on firing until the Apaches showed, and then just backed up slowly and let the Americans come to them. A couple of agile guys with AKs and a knowledge of the cover, could really slow down a US pursuit, that sort of thing. Maybe that's how it went. Of course, I can't say for sure the insurgents got away scot free, but considering their execution of the assault, I have trouble believing they had no plan to keep from getting carved up by the air. Maybe it was as simple as knowing the beaten zone of Apache miniguns and knowing how far laterally to get out of the way, or what cover is good to hide from a minigun sweep. I don't know, but I keep coming back to this huge US firepower edge, and how the insurgents somehow seem to ridden it out, and even managed to police up their dead and wounded in the process. How? I can't explain it, but it sure seems like those guys really knew what they were doing.

MIG0441 - That is a terrific find, absolutely the best thing I have ever seen on Afghanistan. Thanks. AKD - Well, the ANA with the US paratroopers were drinking local water, and they seemed to be ok. The report MIG0441 makes clear the US paratroopers expected water to be delivered by jingle truck, but the problem was the jingle trucks came from a different part of the country, and were (I think quite rightly) afraid to drive to Wanat without serious US escorts, and the US didn't have the escorts. Given that, just to be irritating, I have to wonder why it is 173rd Airborne Brigade staff in the months it had to plan the move to Wanat, didn't think to load a couple of cases of iodine tablets with the contruction materials. Not much weight to helicopter in, and if you do it the soldiers are digging in 60 minutes an hour, rather than 10 minutes an hour. The standard excuse "Well some of our soldiers don't like iodine water" is lame, this is a war not a cafe. Or alternatively, if there were no water purification tablets at least theoretically it would have been possible to boil water in ammo cans. Could have been done in the afternoon down time where digging was impossible, because it was too hot. This is really not a fair suggestion, of course, as the airborne soldiers for sure were so busy, and boiling water to drink is so Not The Army Way, that it's not reasonable to expect them to have thought of it when the water ran low. My point is, the insurgents' ability to scare truck drivers off the road to Wanat, had a direct effect on the level of US entrenchment at Wanat. And entrenchment could have been more, if the airborne had somehow managed to drink water from the river, like the ANA and the villagers. Kind of a mindset issue, it was possible but it wasn't SOP. Vanir, Well from what I have seen from the vids and pix and so on the region is really friggen steep mountains covered either with bush or trees higher up, and terraced for agriculture on the lower levels. UAVes and helicopters can see people moving in terrain like that pretty well, especially if the people are actually in motion. If there were hundreds of insurgents and dozens of casualties, how credible is it no US air recon asset anywhere saw any of them? It's like Steve said, "melting away" is not easy. So that to me argues maybe there were either fewer insurgents, or insurgent casualties, than the Americans estimated. But fair enough, I'm just guessing here. Steve, Of course if your definition of tactical capacity is: "Ability to kick as and take names on any given battlefield", then sure the insurgents are nowhere near the NATO forces. But my point is, the insurgents seem lots of times able to dictate the terms of the battle. If they are able to initiate substantial engagements (i.e. platoon/company vs. singletons snipers or IEDes) under operational conditions that really favour the insurgents, then the NATO forces' tactical superiority in reality, is a good deal less than the theoretical. Further, I think Wanat is a great example of how a battle has far more rammifications than just who held the ground, casualty and equipment counts, and who is better prepared to continue conventional military operations. Heck, NATO itself is saying this is a war that can't be won tactically, and the insurgents sure don't either, so what is the point of interpeting battle implications in narrow tactical terms? So what if the Taliban and their allies cannot, as you correctly point out, reach out and cause harm whenever and wherever they choose to? The Americans certainly can't either, after all, if they could all those insurgents that hit Wanat would be dead. Obviously, each battle is a moment in time where whatever the sides bring to the fight, depends on decisions by both sides in the time line running up to the fight. The insurgents as you point out are doing much better on a loss/damage inflicted ratio when they use roadside bombs or hit supply convoys, but that's only part of an insurgency. They have, at least sometimes, to demonstrate to the people that they are fighting the foreign invaders, and since these are Pathans that means in battle, this is a warrior and jihad culture. So the challenge for insurgent leaders is how to do that, without letting superior NATO firepower gut insurgent forces. My point is, if the insurgency can fight the US forces on even vaguely equal terms from time to time, not often as every one understands the NATO firepower superiority, then the insurgency rep with the people goes way up. They are fighting a jihad, successfully, against a foreign invader. Sure, it's not success as you would define it. But in the minds of the Pathans - again, Islamic warrior culture - it is the very definition of success. Just because the US military can suck up the casualties, doesn't make a successfully-defended patrol base a victory in the war. As far as that goes, I bet the Pathan nation is far more willing to contribute bodies to a holy war against the Christians, than the US and NATO is to contribute bodies in the name of Afghanistan security. If at Wanat most of the attackers got away, and if a goodly number of foreign invaders are killed or wounded, in the face of the incredible NATO technical superiority, this is the first world vs. about the fifth world, in the minds of any reasonable Pathan David defeated Goliath. You and I seem to disagree on whether the stacking occurred accidentally (your view) or because of conscious insurgent thinking (my view.) I'll troll through MIG0441's report, and put together a laundry list of all the stuff the insurgents did, to stack their odds their way at Wanat. My view right this moment, the US did some stuff wrong but it wasn't nearly as critical, as what the insurgents did right.

Alex, Outstanding video, thanks. I sure hadn't seen it. It did make me wonder though, if the US troops were short of water, and that and the heat prevented them from digging in properly, then why didn't they just get water from the river like the Afghans did? One of the AARs speculates that "extra noise" made by Wanat villagers on the day prior to the fight, may have been a cover for insurgent approaches. Maybe, but I bet an alternative is the villagers know there's going to be a fight, so they're stockpiling water for their families and maybe insurgent wounded. Or maybe the extra villager water use was due to the fact it was just hot. Not armchair quarterbacking, just trying to figure out how a first rate US infantry unit managed to run dry of water in a mountain river valley. I guess the policy was to stay behind the wire at all costs. Vanir, Of course I'm guessing. But I can't think of a way 200 - 300 guys could walk out of that region, dragging dozens of wounded by foot, with all that US air and surveillance around. One possible explaination is, there weren't that many insurgent wounded.

Steve, Long post warning. I don't think luck had much to do with it. To me It looks like what happened at Wanat was, the insurgents saw an fleeting opportunity and used smart tactics to grab it with both hands. Part of that was the application of solid infantry skills. These guys knew what they were doing on all sorts of levels. Based on the reports, some Army and some independent, what happened was the 173rd Airborne Brigade command for reasons best known to itself thought for a long time about setting up some kind of base near Wanat, as the bad guys had pretty much owned the valley forever. Getting organized so they could actually put the base down took months, and a common theme in the reports is that the Americans shot themselves in the foot with the delay, as the general plan to send some kind of force to Wanat leaked to the resistance. If it leaked, I would assume that happened the ANA got involved. But if the plan didn't leak, then the resistance dealt with the US moving forces into the region with scary speed. The reinforced Airborne platoon drove to site, a bunch of base construction materials got unloaded, and the paratroopers started digging in. About 24 hours later, they got hit by a complex attack. The reports point out that had the Americans spent 72 hours or more digging in, their base would have been alot more defensible. So intelligence leak or just fast insurgent reaction, one conclusion is inescapable: the insurgent planners understood US forces become much harder to attack when they are fully dug in, and it seems almost as sure that the insurgent leaders made sure their own operation kicked off before that happened. That level of planning is not luck, that is just smart staffwork, on a level professional soldiers expect only from a professional military. The point I am trying to make is, professional militaries have no monopoly on military skill. The attack itself was just before dawn, precisely at the moment the US side lost its night vision advantage. Once you have military halflight, the human eye is pretty much just as good. Maybe not as good as thermals, but see below. I don't think that kind of timing was luck, or coincidence. To me, it's more evidence some one or several some ones had thought long and hard on: OK, how do we hit the Americans and nullify as many American advantages as possible? The way the insurgents ran the assault would have been close to textbook in US Ranger school. The very first shots, the ones that had the advantage of relative surprise, targeted and destroyed the paratroopers' mortar, and both their thermals: one in the TOW hummer, and one probably thermal-type observation device at the OP. Right after that supressive fire, MGs and mortars, came down on the base from several directions, and then fighters assaulted the OP, using RPGs and AKs. It appears the engagement ranges in general were short, and at least some of the time the engagement ranges were grenade distance. This is of course the old Vietcong "grab your opponent by his belt" technique, it makes US use of artillery and air a whole lot more difficult. I find it extremely hard to believe the side with the initiative, the insurgents, engaged at those ranges by accident. If you posit an insurgent force of around 250 fighters, armed with Kalashnikovs, PKMs, some light mortarts, just maybe a Dushka or two, and RPGs, and the mission is kill Americans before the air shows up, then I for one am hard put to think of a way they could have better accomplished their mission. This is not to say that every insurgent participating in the attack could beat Chuck Norris in a fair fight. But it is to say, that somehow, the insurgents pulled off a close to textbook raid by any reasonable military standard. It is interesting to read through the official US reaction that followed. For much of it, the theme seems to be "our boys fought heroically and won," while at the same time denying the insurgents had done anything particularly successful. The problem with that seems to have been sometimes those initial claims are different from the reality. NATO made a statement, "We remain committed to defending the region." Three days after the attack, the patrol base is shut down. The Army press office makes out that the insurgent attack was an alliance of Al Quaeda and Taliban terrorists out to destabilize the region. Then about four months later, it becomes clear that the entire province was mad as Hell at the Americans, as some US pilot bombed a vehicle containing all the civilian doctors in Wanat region. There was, as it turned out, every reason to expect the people living in the valley (these are Pathans with their tradition of blood fueds adter all) would want to kill Americans. The brigade commander, a Colonel Preyslar, goes on record "It wasn't supposed to be a hard defence point", and in any case "No part of it was overrun." About six months pass, the Army keeps reviewing the battle, and now Preyslar is in trouble for having ignored complaints by the LT on the scene, not delivered sufficient water and construction materials to the Wanat base, and generally adopting the attitude that an airborne infantry platoon from 173rd airborne has no need even to try to make friends with the locals, as it can defeat anything the insurgency can throw at it. A later review finds that Preyslar was either misinformed or lying, the OP was overrun, and at one point the insurgents even broke into the main base. It might be interesting to note Colonel Preyslar now is charge of the mech warfare training center at Hohenfels, and developing skills at multinational European mech warfare training isn't the way to become a general these days. Given that US Army record of claiming things about the Battle of Wanat that turn out later not to be so, I take the US Army assertion that 20 - 40 enemy were killed or wounded with a huge grain of salt. Really? With US forces able to observe and drop HE on pretty much every square inch of battlefield an insurgent casualty might be located? With US helicopters on scene about 45 minutes after the battle began, UAVes just a little later, and all of it able to observe and shoot down any group of men, moving anywhere in the vicinity? The insurgency puts in this raid, but they have to get away, and the US military if you believe what it says leads the world in battlefield awareness. Yet the US air pursuit of insurgents by definition leaving the region at sandal speed, produces zero results. I think it is worth considering, that what happened at Wanat was the insurgents did what they did in about 15 minutes of mostly one-way shooting, during which US forces were generally pinned down and unable to find targets suitable for calling air and HE on, in large part because the targets were shooting back. This was a platoon with a single LT and probably about 6 or so NCOs, and we know that during at least part of the firefight, about half of those leaders were not calling down indirect, they were doing what they could to keep the OP from being overrun; and some of them died in the attempt. It could very well be less than 10 insurgents were hit from beginning to end. Usually, when a defensive position is unsucessfully attacked, a classic sign of the failure is broken enemy units leaving equipment and casualties as they break under the defensive fire. Here, when the US got around to policing the battlefield, they found two possible insurgent bodies. So to me it is at least arguable that a possible reason there were so few signs of a badly damaged enemy assault, is because in fact it wasn't damaged much at all. I think is is possible what happened is the insurgents set themselves the general goal of killing every one in a relatively exposed US op, and just maybe probing the US base. There is every sign that the moment US air got close to station, the insurgents had already left, and for the next hour or so the Americans were expending ordnance on empty hillsides. As we have seen, the insurgency has the ability to repeat an action like this after a while, although of course they are nowhere near the ability to hit and knock out US bases at will. But to say this insurgent tactical sucess - that's how I see it - has few military repercussions, I think is short-sighted. As a result of Wanat, US patrol bases have to be bigger and more secure. Trust between US forces and the ANA is reduced - and these two forces must cooperate if the insurgency is to be defeated. But perhaps the most damage to the US cause is in the very likely fact, that there are 200 - 300 Pathans walking around right now that know that given the right conditions US forces can be "defeated" in a battle. As far as they are concerned, they did it, and what they did they can teach others. Since the point to an insurgency is sustainment, the positives a success like Wanat can bring an insurgency go far beyond simple battlefield casualty counts. It strains my credibility to believe people who have been fighting in insurgencies for most or all of their lives, would luck into something like the results of Wanat by accident. Sure, maybe they just got lucky. But I think the odds are a whole lot greater that that battle went down the way it did, because the insurgents had their act together in ways US forces barely grasp. As a final fun item, go here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/75036.html This is a report by a US reporter embedded with Marines that walked into an ambush. 4 Marines, 8 ANA, and an interpeter dead; I forget the number of wounded. It happened about a month ago, it was a foot patrol that got opened up on as they walked down mountain valley and approached a village. The insurgents timed the engagement so that when they began firing, the Marines would naturally seek cover behind a berm inbetween them and the insurgents, with about 50 meters of open ground between them and the next cover back. Then other insurgents on hill shoulders worked their way around to fire down on the Marines pinned up against the berm. As at Wanat, engagement ranges were short, at one point a Marine said a couple of insurgents got close enough to demand his surrender. Air took close to an hour to show up, all in all a bad day for the blue side. Is this another case of the insurgents "getting lucky"? If it was luck, it was just awfully forturnate for the dirtbag insurgents with their awful fire discipline and dirty weapons accidently to open fire on the Americans so that the Americans would take cover in a potential kill zone, and futher that some of the insurgents moving randomly about the battlefield just happened to work their way around the Marines' flanks, and turn the potential kill zone into a real one? Why is it that every time the Afghan insurgents, who come from a culture continuously engaged in mountain guerilla war since the late 1970s, are just "lucky" when they pull off a textbook ambush, and display generally excellent knowledge of infantry tactics? How is it that US forces (in this case Marines) keep telling themselves they are terrific fighters and tremendous infantrymen, the best the world has ever seen, when one of the very first lessons of fire and movement is: "Clear the high ground first, stupid." I think it would be intellectually honest to face the fact that, these days, the Afghan insurgents are at least sometimes better at small unit tactics than their NATO opponents, and as a general thing on par. The fighting in Afghanistan is, it seems, not awesome 1st World forces using superior technology and training to demolish effortlessly 4th World morons who barely know one end of an AK from the other. Just because NATO forces tell themselves they are incredibly effective soldiers, does not make it so, especially not against motivated Afghan tribesmen.

Steve, There is a semi-censored AAR on this fight floating around the Internet, if you haven't seen it you should. My read, the "massed assault" at Wanat, as you call it, was over from the insurgent side in about 15 - 20 minutes. They hit an OP and killed every one in it, and then when the platoon LT and a couple of guys tried to reinforce the OP, the insurgents shot them down too. The insurgents at the same time used high ground to put the whole US base under fire, and even after US air arrived on station - including a friggin' B1A1 and 155mm firing w/in about 2 minutes from when the assault kicked off, and continuously for the next hour - all the blues could come up with was a pair of dead bodies. Who supposedly were Taliban, but that's what the Army said. The Army also said 20 - 40 insurgents probably were killed or wounded. There is no evidence, it could be 200 - 400 or 2 - 4. As best as I can tell it's a number the Army estimates based on the amount of explosives they unloaded on the AO. But it really looks like the insurgents just got away pretty much intact. The initial attack by the insurgents targeted the US' forces most critical crew-served weapons: a mortar, a TOW HUMMV, and some kind of thermal imaging device in the OP. The insurgents used MGs, mortars, and RPGs to lay down supressing fire, and to support assaults. They came from it looks like at least three directions, and they managed to execute this assault w/in 48 hours of the Americans arriving at Wanat and setting up camp. Think for a second of the "staffwork" necessary, to get about 200 armed tribesmen in hidden positions around a US patrol base, ready to launch a deliberate assault, in 48 hours or less, and your available means of transport are pretty much two or four feet. (Had the Americans finished their berms and completed the wire etc., things might have been different, yada yada yada.) The insurgents appear to have armed themselves, in part, by prior agreement with the Wanat police force. It is a good bet that was also an intelligence pipeline. In Afghanistan, there are ways other than UAVes to find out what the opposition is up to! As a result of the Wanat battle NATO left the region and, aside from patrols armed for bear and always keeping moving, has yet to come back. Sure, roughly 30 per cent or so casualties on reinforced US airborned infantry platoon isn't going to kick the Americans out of the war. So you're right, attrition-wise the battle didn't do the insurgents much good. But from the insurgent POV, they took the Americans on, and used good infantry tactics to better the high tech Americans. Engagements like that are really important to the insurgency, as it's one thing to blow up bombs or assassinate collaborators, and it's another to pick a straight up ground battle and use guile and discipline to win it. Talk about an effective recruiting tool. The reports about the US heroics in the fight are pretty close to propaganda. Not to say the US troopers didn't fight well, by all accounts they did, although most of them seem to have returned fire and waited for air and indirect to lift the heat. The US troopers that went beyond that, it looks like, for the most part got killed without having much effect on the battle. But the point to the war is not to prove how brave one's soldiers are, it's to defeat the enemy. And if the insurgents kill or wound around two dozen the "foreign occupiers" in a straight-up fight, and then basically clear out scot free, that's a huge morale victory for the insurgency. Something they would love to repeat if they could. And as we have just seen, it appears they can. [Rant] One of the worst canards out there is that the US forces on the ground in Afghanistan somehow are the bestest, baddest warriors in the history of mankind. Leaving aside the obvious suspects like the Wehrmacht and the Spartans and the Roman Legions and Napoleon's Guard and the Swiss pikemen and so on aside for a moment, consider the Pathans. Compared to US/NATO forces, Pathans can move faster, hide better, operate in a wider variety of terrain, and do more with less in worse conditions. They have more combat experience, they know the ground better by several orders of magnitude, and they have defeated at two superpowers in the last century. They can survive on bread and water pretty much indefinately. If necessary, they appear quite willing to die, and if they are hit they do not expect a Medevac. In the US army you're a veteran if you've heard shots a couple of times and have a year or more in theater. In the Pathans, you have lived in a war all your life, and most of what you know about how to behave on a battlefield, your father or uncle taught you, and he was in a war his whole life too. How members of a US force with all its tech and cost and political strings attached somehow amount in any one's mind to more dangerous fighters than the Pathans, is beyond me.[/rant]

Slowmotion. Nice find on the pix, thanks.

Those are indeed T-64. As I understand it (Wiki) Russia has something like 4,000 of them still on the books, so the pics Gunner showed us are just the tip of the iceberg. Take that lot and multiply it by about 90 to 100; that's how many tanks we're talking about. And that's just in Russia, about 2,500 supposedly are rusting away in Ukraine. Interestingly, and apropos of keeping production technology going, when the Ukrainians decided to make a modern MBT they based it on the T-64, not the T-72 - and this after having produced upgraded T-72es (called T-80DU) for Pakistan. The Ukrainians were making noise recently that they had kitted out their first battalion with this modernised T-64, it's called a "Bulat". They say it's wonderful but they want to sell it. Anyway, the tank's production means that the Kharkov Plant Named For Morozov - you know, the people that thought up the T-34 - is still producing tanks. So kinda cool even if the Bulat sucks. As I understand it the feeling in Ukraine is that the T-64 is still a very viable frame with fine gun, and to modernize it what you need is updated electronics and applique armor, and to a lesser extent ergonomics and more powerful engine. Here's a linkie from the factory, in case any one is tank shopping. http://www.morozov.com.ua/eng/body/bulat.php

I think the idea is that these are vehicles that were part of a reserve park, their job was either to be married up to reserve units forming up in case of a huge war, or regular units filling out for a medium-sized war, or ed into the line if it were a smaller war, but any case with continuing tank casualties. That in case of a war where you need alot of tanks fast, the tanks are there. But of course even in a climate-controlled environment tanks sitting still and not maintained are not going to last forever. The standard approach was once the vehicle got produced it got stuck in a marginally-heated garage with a unit and received periodic maintenance, then it would get transferred to a cold garage and get even less maintenance, and several more years it would get parked in a field. The tanks don't have a kilometer on the clock, but by the time they got to the state we see in the picture they've probably have been sitting around for 20 or 30 years. Sure that was kind of wasteful from a Western POV, but then tanks in the Russian/Soviet mind are expendable items anyway, more like ammunition or, er, people; than something really critical to winning a war like a tank factory or a troop school and its training staff or an oil refinery complex. The Russians/Soviet HATE to throw stuff out, sooo after about 40 years of Cold War the net result is fields and fields parked with tanks that were built to fight in World War Three. They probably haven't been maintained in a decade or more, and have just been sitting in the elements waiting for the authorities to find a scrap metal buyer. So when you look at it from their point of view it makes sense, as very often wierd Russian behavior does. You have soldiers and you don't have the resources to train them properly, and you have all these tank hulks that need to have all the non-metal bits ripped out, before they're useful as scrap. Obviously, the solution is turn the troops loose on the tanks, as young men they'll have fun smashing things but since they're underfed and Russian give them just a little time and they'll unscrew and unfasten everything with a possible civilian use, sell it on the black market, meaning there is no real need to pay them to strip the hulks. And of course - and here's the beauty part - Russian tank troops that have taken tanks apart, are tank troops that know tank mechanics really, really well. Troops like those, you can just hand them a spare part and tell them "put it in", and you don't have to worry about unit level maintenance or supply channels or training mechanics, or even tools. Which fits right into the Soviet operational theory on tanks which says that the way to use them is to turn a whole bunch of them loose in a direction, and they operate on their own without support, and stop when they run out of fuel.

Costard, I agree with you, if the powers that be were really sensible they would be attacking the Helmand drug problem on two fronts, first by making it worth while for the Helmand poppy farmers not to raise poppies, and second by legalising opium and herion. I'm way out on the left wing on that, I would make pretty much every drug legal and make only the really nasty ones - heroin and coke maybe - prescription drugs. I know it wouldn't fix the War on Drugs problem completely, but at least it would make narcotics a local business rather than an international one; the main trade would be domestically-manufactured narcotics stolen somehow from pharmacies or dispensed by dishonest doctors, to those people who for whatever reason must get their drugs illegally even though most of it was legally available. But since that's nut job POV with no chance of becoming reality, we have to think about dealing with the narcotics industry in Helmand province, which brings us directly to CMSF. If the goal is to build scenarios based on NATO ops in Helmand province, and one wants to try and match the probable real engagements rather than pretend ones, I think it is logical that a good portion of them be drug-related. Not: "NATO base is attacked by insurgents," or "Cool elite NATO infantry backed by air go after bad guy insurgent leader in his mountain lair." Realistically, operations like that are going to be few and far between. You want to model the likely reality, you need to be thinking more about missions like this: - NATO platoon moves into village, attempts to find head man, crappy insurgent teenagers attempt to kill a NATO soldier or two without getting blown away themselves. - Insurgents are more organized in village, assume they are outsiders, and their victory goal is getting NATO to level the village. - NATO troops have to burn a poppy field/poppy bulb processing buildings, owners resist. - NATO troops are en route to meeting with local elders in some village to discuss drug policy, get ambushed along way. - Insurgents attempt to raid local police station/village mayor's house for weapons/hostages/money/confiscated product, NATO quick response force attempts to deal with situation. Etc. The idea would be that the two sides would move through the battle tree based on success/failure in the drug war, which would translate into CMSF into the NATO side trying to kill insurgents w/o destroying too much civilian life and property, and the insurgent side trying to up the NATO casualty count. JonS, No worries, thanks for the check.

Sometimes I wonder if just paying farmers not to grow poppies would be the solution. The cost of deploying alll those NATO soldiers into the province and running operations has got to be outrageous, like in the millions of dollars a day range. The numbers seem to vary, but from what I gather a generic opium poppy farmer can make between 2,000 and 10,000 dollars a year depending on the size of his field, how much work he puts into collecting poppy syrup, and what kind of cut the local authorities extort from him. At the risk of another math error, but just for fun, I wonder, how effective would a strategy of paying farmers to raise nothing be? You know, like the subsidies farmers sometimes get in the US and EU. If NATO forces are burning through rough guess 5 to 10 million dollars a day stomping around Helmand province, and a tempting offer to a farmer has to double his yearly income on poppies, then the way I count it - and I'm not double-checking the math, so you're warned - it looks like you could buy off maybe 500 to 1,000 opium farmers every day you took the money you were spending on military operations, and pumped it into farmer payments. So if of the 1.5 million Helmand residents say 1 in 20 is an opium farmer, that's 75,000 opium farmers you need to buy off total, and so (again, if my WAG calculator is working right) in minimum 3 months maximum 1 year you will have bought off every single farmer in the province, if you take the money out of military operations and pump it into agricultural subsidies/farmer bribes. This is from a perfect solution, most obviously because if you dump a whole bunch of cash in the economy the first thing you get is massive inflation which will anger the people, and the second thing is even more government corruption as the bureaucrats depend on it will figure out how to take their cut. But on the other hand you aren't killing people, you have next to zero troop footprint, you aren't trying to hunt down bad guys, you remove the main pretext for jihad, and oh by the way if you are concerned about NATO soldier lives, you have your soldiers out of harm's way. I think the powers that be are well aware of all this, and I suspect they have something like this in mind, but honestly the problem is there are all sorts of big government organizations wanting to be involved in a place like Afghanistan, more than they are interested in solving Afghanistan's problems. The military wants to do combat operations, the AID folks need top-down investment programs, and the Afghan government bureaucracy wants to grow its own police power and control of money sent by the Christian governments. A program just to pay off Helmand farmers works against the interests of all these groups, it takes money from the big organizations and just gives it to the farmers. Since the first priority for a big organization is to justify its existence, the big organizations are not going to be enthusiastic about a plan that reduces their influence. The news reports I think give a good example of the upshot of all this. The Marines rolled into this town, decided to set up shop, and after a bit of terrain analysis decided a particular house on the outskirts of the village would be the best site for the temporary Marine HQ. Since the rules are to be touchy-feely, this meant the Marine local CO, I think it was a Captain, had to convince the owner of the house to clear out for the duration of the Marine's stay. The offer according to the stories was one hundred bucks, or roughly, 1 - 2 week's income for your average Afghan opium poppy farmer; or maybe 1 month's income for a poor Afghan family head. Which to my mind is crazy. If I was living in my house and some foreign soldiers showed up and told me if I moved out and let them move in, they would give me a month's salary, I would tell them to get lost. This is my home we're talking about, who's going to uproot his family for a month's salary? If the offer was a year's salary, or even better 2 or 3 times the value of the house, that's another conversation. But the Marine Captain - I am sure because the Civilian Affairs people advised him not to overpay so as to keep the neighbors happy - was offering chump change. The result? Well, according to the story first the house owner says he's not sure, then he says the village headman has to decide, then it turns out no one can find the headman (yeah right, in a provincial Afghan village in the middle of a US Marine invasion/visit no one knows where the headman is), then the house owner says "yes", and then he changes his mind because the Taliban will probably kill him when the Marines leave. And meanwhile the Marines are standing around getting angry and wondering why they have to screw with these Afghan civilians who can't make up their mind, Marines are supposed to kill, not haggle over real estate. It's just a shame I think that with all the resources the US has to deal with this region, somehow it works out that when it comes time to talk cash actually in the hands of a person whose heart and mind has a direct impact on the insurgency, the US is offering peanuts. System's broke, it ought to be fixed.

JohnS, Mea culpa. Could be NATO forces are getting close to the magic 10:1 ratio. Assuming of course the insurgents are drawing one or less of every hundred potential fighters, and the NATO troops stay in the province. We'll see how it goes.

On whether or not Afghanistan is a smart place to commit troops, only time will tell. History would bet "no", but the question is of course how much application history has to the present campaign. As current events' applicability to CMSF modeling, I think that troop density should have a direct impact on the kind of scenarios the one would build. The fights are not going to be companies and battalions coming down on Taliban die-hards. They're going to be platoons and squads getting ambushed. In the present RL operation, as I understand it the Marines have hit some resistance and killed something like 10 - 30 insurgents. Here's the linkie on that: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090705/wl_asia_afp/afghanistanunrestusbattle_20090705030416 I love the Marine telling the reporter that a Marine company is "the most feared thing in the world". Anyway, moving right along, the Taliban for their part appear to be thinking, I read they hit some kind of fire base way the heck out of Helmand, in Paktia province, and they started off the attack with a suicide truck aimed at the base gate, and then shooting up the base for an hour or two. Killed a couple of Allied personnel. Within Helmand a suicide bomber hit a 4-vehicle security contractor convoy, 1 Allied dead, 4 wounded. Also a bomb got two ANA in a village. And outside Helmand 7 ANA police killed and 2 injured, roadside bomb. So there seems to be some evidence that if one wants to model an operation in Helmand, the actual combat it produces, and so we would want to model, is just as likely to take place outside of Helmand. Here's a linkie to a wrap-up from yesterday: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2009/07/200974184336848756.html So scenario-wise, maybe the way to build a campaign is not a single unit going through a series of connected actions, but rather a series of actions all over the map. Battle 1 is the Marines clearing some ville of local yokels most of whom will run, but maybe a couple will shoot. Then your next battle is the Taliban reaction, a raid of some kind way the heck somewhere else, kicked off with a suicide bomber. Depending on how that battle goes the tree takes the player to say a roadside ambush scenario, with previous battles influencing the force ratios. Then depending on how that battle goes, you start a tree, where if the Marines are winning their have missions of "clear this place and take control without trashing everything", within increasing difficult terrain. And if the insurgents are winning then it's first they get to hit the Marines during a village clearing operation, then graduate maybe to an organized ambush of transport columns, and maybe finish up with a grand assault on some provincial headquarters where the mission is kill all the ANA and the unlucky Marine element stuck out there with them. It would be a huge amount of work to build a campaign like that, besides all the differing battle maps you'd have to work out the victory conditions so that the campaign could see-saw, for instance the insurgents do well the first few battles and they start moving down the branch leading to insurgent victory, but then they screw up a battle and the Marines get the initiative. To do it right it would take a month or two of work eight hours a day, plus the play-testing. But man it would be great to play. Oh yeah, on the "magic number" to win, as noted the standard answer is 10 - 1, so it all comes down to how many insurgents are out there. If Helmand province has about 250,000 military age men, and 1 in 100 decide to fight, that means 2,500 active insurgents, and to defeat them according to the forumula you need 250,000 NATO soldiers and allies. You beat up on the insurgents and get the population behind the central government, maybe you can shift the insurgent from population ratio to 1 in 1000. By the formula, that produces an insurgent force of 250 fighters, who by the forumula should be defeated by 25,000 NATO-type soldiers and their allies. I think this numerical exercise is useful, because people talk "boots on the ground" all the time, but discussion of what sufficient boots on the ground is, is really rare. And the bottom line here is that 15,000 or so NATO forces and allies, by the classic rules of insurgency warfare, are sufficient in numbers to defeat an insurgent force of 150 fighters. Which leaves only two more questions: - Maybe the classic ratio forumula is wrong for Helmand province? - Maybe out of the 250,000 fighting-age men in Helmand province, there is a way to convince them not to fight NATO to such an extent, that no more than 1 in about 1,500 or 1 in 2,000 actually joins the insurgency.

Fair enough, but so what? This is a NATO operation. The tail element is huge, I would bet the tooth-to-tail ratio in Afghanistan right now is the worst in military history. All those soldiers, they need suppport elements. All those support elements, they need bases. ll those bases, they need guards. And then there are troops going on vacation, getting sick, getting in trouble and locked up, etc. etc. However many troops are in there, only a small portion are going outside the wire, which is what counts. Even you assume there are 15,000 combat troops in Helmand province - which to my mind is a gross overestimate - the key question is, how many foot patrols (or small vehicle patrols in the desert) can that force generate, and can that density of foot patrols secure Helmand region from the insurgents? Again, this is a territory the size of West Virginia, with a population of maybe 250,000 - 300,000 fighting-age men. Don't forget that number, I'll come back to it. To be effective, the patrols can't just roll through a village once a week or a day or whatever. They've got to be present long enough, and with sufficient intelligence, to get ahead of the insurgents on indimidating/getting friendly with the population. Now let's look at the insurgents, who also aren't without cards to bring to the table. Sure, they have compared to NATO crappy weapons and even worse support arms. Still, they have - Absolute ability to talk to the natives, in their own language - The same ethnicity as the natives - The same religion as the natives - The moral advantage that the religion of the region, that the insurgents share with the population, overwhelmingly considers fighting NATO troops, a jihad. - Financial support from the largest single poppy-growing region in the world, or more exactly, the organized crime groups making money from it. - Financial support from whatever Islamic contributors who are willing to send cash to see a big US operation flub - Outstanding knowledge of the terrain, as the most part, they live there - Sanctuary in Pakistan, or indeed in other Pathan regions in Afghanistan - NATO intentionally using tactics making ambushes of NATO troops easier - the NATO troopers are on foot more, in smaller groups, and more spread out. That's McChrystal's plan. Now, a rule of thumb in anti-insurgency warfare is, that all other things being equal, it takes 10 regular soldiers in the field to defeat 1 insurgent. You can improve that ratio of course if you get the population behind you, or are just willing to terrorize the population. So a good question to ask is, how many insurgent fighters are there likely to be in Helmand province? I figure, with a population of 750,000, and maybe 250,000 are men capable of bearing arms, so now the question is how many would be willing to go fight against NATO? One in 10, one in 20, one in 50? One in 100? Let's low-ball it, and say 1 in 100 Helmand fighting age males is willing to fight NATO. That gives a potential insurgent base of 2,500 hard core combatants, plus at a guess maybe 4 - 5 times that of villagers or people who sympathize with the insurgency, and might not be actual full time combatants, but might provide intelligence or help out with the jihad. Nor is that all. Besides the opium gangsters and valley warlords, there is the Taliban organization which can bring combatants and organizing capability to Helmand province, although how many is any one's guess. But it doesn't really matter. This single province contains dozens of towns, hundreds and maybe thousands of villages, has no road network, no communications infrastructure, and by the standards of most nations no government. This isn't Iraq where the government can hang the old dictator and people learn about it on TV and radio, and so learn the new government is in charge. In Helmand province, for much of the population, there is no TV or radio, or even newspaper. People get information by word of mouth, and in mosques. The Marines as I understand it have either one or two reinforced regiment wandering around Helmand province. Probably about 5 or 6 battalions. The Brits have probably a couple of battalions there as well, the Danes I think 1, and figure the other contingents aggregated are equivalent to another battalion. I'm probably skipping some forces, but then not all the forces I'm counting here really is capable of going out of the wire. But for fun, let's say that these 10 battalions are, and further, that they could all go out at once and that somehow the bases and the support guys would still be guarded and able to do their jobs. Ten battalions is, roughly, 100 - 120 platoons. A platoon is of course about four vehicles and 30 - 35 armed guys. Those are the ones actually who you are going to have going into the sticks. Me, I think 100 - 120 vehicle patrols that is not nearly enough to have much of any effect on a lawless territory the size of West Virginia. I don't think 100 - 120 vehicle patrols would be sufficient to prevent the citizens of real life West Virginia from speeding whenever they felt like it. Heck, I bet if say the Chinese sent 100 - 120 vehicle patrols into West Virginia, it would take a long time for most West Virginians to actually see one of the patrols. Territory is too big, number of patrols is too small. I would say the insurgency rule of thumb (you need 10 to 1 to defeat the insurgents) makes this estimate a very safe guess. If you count the number of soldiers NATO is likely actually to put on the ground, maybe 8,000, then that force is according to the traditional rules (i.e., historical cases where insurgencies were defeated) sufficient to supress maybe 800 insurgents. The critical thing is infantrymen able to kick in doors and dig insurgents out of holes. Things like Leopard 2 tanks I would say are a liability, they suck up tons of resources, are rarely used to figh insurgents, and whatever battle benefit you get from a Leopard 2 tank has to be weighed against the morale loss if that tank gets damaged or just breaks down in the wrong place. Tanks are big and heavy and if they stop in Indian territory the friendlies burn them, and that fire will be on YouTube. But really the problem is numbers. Even if every single NATO soldier in Helmand right now, every cook, press attache, general's adjutant, pilot, and recruitment NCO were to go on patrol, it would still be at an absolute maximum 20,000 pairs of boots on the ground, and so at best capable of dominating say 2,000 insurgents - assuming of course all those suppport troopers were capable of actually walking in the mountains and deserts and hunting Pathan tribesmen. The insurgency, to put into the field too many fighters for this theoretical NATO all-infantry/total tooth force, more than the 2,000; which of course the real-life insurgency can in Helmand province if it manages to attract one of every one hundred fighting age men to its cause. I think it it safe to say an insurgency legitimately calling itself a jihad, and fighting foreign and largely Christian opponents, would have a fair chance of attracting well more than one out of every one hundred fighting men to its cause. And that prediction is just the worst case for the insurgency, it could be much better. All sorts of things could improve the draw. If the insurgency gets money from the outside, aid from the drug barons, volunteers from Pakistan, (more) support to the Taliban from Pakistan intelligence, defectors from the Jordanian contingent, or NATO bombs a really big wedding party, etc., then the insurgent force could double, triple, heck the sky's the limit. It is of course possible that were this operation to last for several years, NATO could make some headway, reduce support for the insurgency, increase the ANA forces on hand to repress the insurgency, make some deals with the drug barons, and get some kind of peace. But all this assumes some kind of Afghan government, even at the point of a gun, can be imposed on Helmand province, before the operation ends and the bulk of the troops leave. The scary part about all this of course is this: We are talking about one single Afghan province. Last I heard about half of Afghanistan's 35 provinces were under Taliban control. If the best that NATO can do is concentrate 8,000 - 16,000 troops in a single Afghan province, if that's a major operation, then the smart money must bet NATO will lose. I'll wrap this up with a recent pic (yesterday or today) of what actual US boots on the actual ground of Helmand look like, sometimes. As we can see Marine command has made very sure the force has sufficient equipment to do the job, and then some.

Apropos the "major operation" currently in progress in Helmand, with about 8,500 Marines and contingents from the ANA: Helmand Province: Total Area: 58,584 km² (22,619 sq mi) Population: 745,000 (estimated) US State of West Virginia: Total Area: 24,230 sq mi (62,755 km²) Total Population: 1.8 million So by way of scale, roughly the task before the Marines is to establish peace in an area the size of West Virginia, except the mountains are about 6000 feet (2000 meters) higher, and the lowlands aren't nice wooded valleys but desert. Further, West Virginia of course is surrounded by regions more or less friendly to US forces. Helmand abuts against Pakistan's NW territory, and yes the overwhelmingly dominant ethnicity of Helmand and the NW territory is Pathan/Pashto/Pushtu. Now I don't want to be a wet blanket or anything, but I am old enough to remember (and indeed if I'm honest I could mention relatives) West Virginia resistance to the US attempt to enforce the dry laws were, during the 1920s and early 1930s, absolutely unsuccessful. And at times the West Virginian moonshiners resisted using what we would now call partisan/terrorist tactics. Or less recently, consider US Army efforts to repress true partisans/terrorists like John Mosby during the US Civil War, also in the same general area. Not exactly a glittering US military success, most historians agree. Can the modern US Marines do better in a more hostile environment, where they can't speak with the inhabitants and in the eyes of most inhabitants they are foreign invaders? Can 10,000 or so soldiers supported by plenty of air and technical intelligence collection, even enforce security in an area the size of West Virginia, never mind get the population on the Marine side? General McChrystal says yes. Me, I'm doubtful. Especially when you start counting the boots not on the ground (every soldier above the level of rifle company, and every soldier down to private not in a rifle company) there are probably 6,000 - 7,000 soldiers out there actually capable of doing a foot patrol. For a territory the size of West Virginian, that's not near enough, and that's before you take into account the fact the patrols can't just be out there sometimes, but 24/7. Should be interesting to see what victories get reported, by both sides. The Pathans have themselves a US military service prisoner, I see.

Hear hear. I can see Other Means' point about modern society needing heroes, but even though some of them were doubtless very brave I think that soldiers are iffy role models. I would not, generally speaking, choose them. Whatever heroics war provides, it is outweighed by the death and destruction. War in my opinion almost always cannot be redeemed, it is with a few rare exceptions always bad and not worth it. Every time I see a war documentary or news piece about some soldier acting heroically, I want to shout at the screen: "Yeah, but how many people had to die (and property be damaged, and families smashed, and societies upended) to provide the backdrop for that heroic act?" or, quite often - "Yeah, but this hero of yours, he was armed and part of an army. What about the civilians that get bombed and shot and raped in the same damn war, they can't call in artillery and they can't shoot back, their casualty rates are a bazillion times what this soldier's unit suffered, why isn't any one giving the civilians medals? I don't think honestly heroic acts by soldiers are impossible, of course. But it seems to me like the process of singling out war heroes almost always has more to do with society's leaders trying to convince society good can be found in war, and society's followers must be prepared to sacrifice in wars, than it does with praising exemplary behavior. Here's Sherman's quote: "There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell." This is the basis of the famouse "war is hell" line. But I think it's worth emphasising the all in the actual quote. Me, I think society would be far better off if it held up AIDS doctors or street cops or teachers in gangster-run high schools or indeed maybe even garbagemen as its heroes. You look at the numbers, and the personal risk of these people face is higher than many if not most soldiers, and the job of these people is directly helping society, which is a bit different from what a soldier does, which is killing people from another society in the name of his own society's good. Of course, stories about the glory of war are older than Homer, and young men haven't gotten any wiser since the Troy campaign, so I don't think society is in any danger of looking at soldiers and combat honestly any time soon.