Ninja II

Us and them
And after all we're only ordinary men
Me and you
God only knows it's not what we would choose to do
"Forward" he cried from the rear and the front rank died
And the General sat, and the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
--Us and Them, Pink Floyd

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To recap the first failure of Ninja (Operation Red Wings), the action for which Patrick Murphy earned the Medal of Honor: the recon team had been discovered by local goatherds, and instead of immediate radio request for exfiltration, the 4-man team maneuvered position and were ambushed the next morning by possibly 200 Taliban.

The next major failure is shattering, and even Miniter cannot draw a halo on it.

Twenty minutes after the helicopters were dispatched, "the pilot had bad news":

"The two Black Hawks, including Healy's were too heavy to vault over the peaks of Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province. . . . the choppers diverted to Jalalabad, where 16 men were ordered off the Black Hawks. With more than 10 minutes lost, the two helicopters decided to outrun their slower, armored escorts. Contact with the trapped SEAL team had been lost."

How can this be? This is the supposed 80-man team at-the-ready. These are Night Stalkers -- an elite SOF asset -- and we are to understand they do not know the load limits of their birds, nor the elevation of the terrain involved? This is a tragicomedy, a Chinese fire drill.

When the Black Hawks enter the landing zone, Taliban fire an RPG round, which explodes inside the first helicopter.

"The SEALS onboard the second Black Hawk were horrified to see the lead chopper explode, tilt its nose upward and spill men to the ground. The remaining air crew, belted in, were trapped inside a flaming comet, plunging down into a boulder-choked ravine. Healy, McGreevy and a dozen others were gone."

Why would any leader attempt an insertion under enemy fire without the suppressive fire of gunships? This is plain foolhardy and cannot be justified even as a desperation measure. If the recon team just got destroyed, it is a safe assumption that there will be heavy anti-aircraft fire to include automatic weapons and RPG's.

Miniter assures us the SEALs inside the 2nd copter "desperately wanted to land and make the enemy pay. But the radio gave different orders: leave now." Fortunately someone was now making decisions on a rational rather than emotional basis.

One cannot make the enemy pay. You can kill them, but that won't return the 19 friendly KIA's to life. This is not a computer game, it is real-life brutal combat.

When Miniter, writing about the rescue of the bodies, says, "the cavalry had come," it's time to tune out. The question remains: Where was the 80-man assault element previously mentioned as a component of this operation?

If the plan called for an 80-man reaction force, then artillery or aerial rocket artillery should have been pre-planned to support the assault and recon teams' efforts. In addition, aviation assets should have been on-station and ready to launch. Yeah, sure, the cavalry had come, but they were riding dead horses.

The Taliban were controlling the pace of battle. We gave up the principle of initiative when the first shot was fired. It is safe to assume that anti-coalition forces were pushing the SEALs down into a pre-planned kill zone.

The Taliban displayed a level of proficiency one would expect of U.S. SOF ground assets. They fought good, solid, well-planned small unit Infantry action. Murphy's team was totally reactive and defensive, therefore, they were the designated losers.

This entire operation seems based on a hope and a prayer, and not a chaplain anywhere in sight. The author calls it a "rescue", but it was a salvage operation and a body recovery mission. Nobody were rescued except Marcus Luttrell, who survived with a broken back by the good graces of goatherd who took him into his stone hut.

This failure of colossal proportions, like the Pat Tillman incident, proves the Army maxim: when a big screw up occurs, promote, or award medals. The Army's answer to an eraser.

Addendum: Author Richard Miniter is the best-selling author of two books which Borders does not stock. Each explains how Bill Clinton is to blame for Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden. You can guess the audience which drove these books into best-seller status. That's right -- your fellow Americans.

Miniter's non-credentials as a "terrorism expert" include a terminal degree of a B.A. in philosophy from a liberal arts college. He has never worked in the military or government. He would make a fine writer of YA adventure stories.

Operation Red Wings Failure

Marti was a fightin' man
Whose story should be told
He was a son of circumstance
He couldn't quite control
--Marti's Last Stand,
Enter the Haggis
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The soon to be published book Sawtelo Sar: The Untold Story of Operation Red Wings and Whalers, by Ed Darack, will discuss the "disinformation and missed-information" surrounding Red Wings, the operation for which Michael P. Murphy received his Medal of Honor (Michael P. Murphy MOH).

While we are glad Mr. Darack has written his book, why is there disinformation attached to any U.S. combat operation in the glorious War on Terror? Of his statement I have no doubt, but why does it devolve to an embedded independent stock photographer and adventure writer who was never in the military to expose these facts?

Included on the website promoting the book is a picture of Jason Kamiya, Commanding General of CJTF-76, so this operation was a Task Force, which generally translates as a combination of forces arrayed under a single commander to fulfill a specific mission. T.F.'s are usually of a short duration and are not habitual unit relationships.

As a small aside, the General is wearing an Expert Infantry Badge, so the task force was commanded by a MG without a Combat Infantry Badge.

"The objective of [Operation Red Wings] was to 'disrupt anti-coalition militia operations that could potentially affect the upcoming national elections,' Translation: the Marines along with local Afghan forces would interdict those responsible for the creation and employment of IEDs (improvised explosive devices, commonly referred to as 'roadside bombs'), mortar and rocket attacks, and ambushes that destabilized the remote Kunar Province."

To the best of my memory, T.F.'s are usually Battalion-sized efforts with attachments, i.e, artillery, aviation, armor or whatever is required to fulfill the mission. Therefore, a Battalion Commander should be the T.F. commander, and T.F.'s are usually named for the T.F. Commander.

One of the difficulties that should have been anticipated before the operation kicked off was that this was a CJTF, with inherent problems built-in. As example, the Iranian hostage fiasco during Desert One demonstrates the services still have problems working J-level operations. Bay of Pigs, Son Tay Raid, Grenada offer other examples.

Operations are difficult enough at the service level, and adding outside resources does not make things go more smoothly. When will the U.S. services learn this lesson?

The target for Murphy's SEAL team was a militia led by Ahmed Shah which was neither Taliban or al-Qaeda, though it probably had financial links to both. It was one of "approximately 22" distinct oppositional units operating in the region. Murphy's unit was ratted out by a goat herder.

Once again, U.S. military members are being used to suppress and/or kill non-Taliban, non-al-Qaeda personnel; how does this constitute a part of the War on Terror? Surely Ahmed Shah is a rough customer, but so what? How does this impact the welfare of the U.S.?

When there are 22 distinct anti-coalition militias (ACM) in the area, one must question the validity of elections in such a region. This indicates a civil war, which has nothing to do with the security of America. To throw American troops into the fray is like putting them in a bumper car in which they will be buffeted by any number of known and unknown hostiles. The cars may be different colors, but they all look alike.

The actions of these militias can not even be justified as terrorism as it is a classic guerrilla / unconventional warfare scenario. Why does the U.S. military kill people and conduct combat operations to prop up phony puppet governments that do not reflect the will of the people?

It is doubtful that Afghanistan will ever have a representative government even if the U.S. military were to kill every goat , chicken, dog and goat herder in the area. Some things are beyond the purview of combat power. Afghanistan was a failed state when the U.S. invaded; the production of choreographed elections does not alter that reality. Kabul will never be an Athenian democracy.

Battalion 2/3 decided to name its operations after hockey teams. Why do we believe that sports analogize to combat operations? The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) is not a sporting event, and there will be no winners, though there are cheerleaders, but they never were in harm's way.

The fact that Shah was shot and chased out of the region in a subsequent operation (Whalers) is as meaningless as warm spit. He is simply regrouping in another location for another day, and his units will return as soon as the Marines pack their rucks and split the scene.

Shah and his inheritors will still be there when the Marines are old and telling their war stories in a VFW post.