Following is an excerpt from Little America: The Battle Within the War for Afghanistan, by Rajiv Candrasekaran, out that week from Knopf.
As top Army commanders cast about for supplementary troops to go to Kandahar in 2009, they settled esteem a brigade that had never deployed to a war section and had spent the previous year preparing for a voyage in Iraq. The unit’s commander, Col. Harry Tunnell, got say publicly message about his new mission while he and his crowd were conducting their last major exercise before shipping off hurtle Iraq.
Tunnell had been gravely wounded in Iraq, where he frantic a battalion of paratroopers with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Twist October 2003, his convoy was ambushed by insurgents near say publicly city of Kirkuk. He was shot through the leg when he stepped out of his Humvee. Although he eventually regained the ability to walk, running long distances was out salary the question. That would have been a career ender desire most officers, but the Army didn’t want to lose Tunnell. He was among the very few African-American infantry battalion commanders, and his aggressiveness on the battlefield had led senior officers to predict that he would eventually become a general. Significant was allowed to substitute the running portion of his yearly physical fitness test with a bicycle ride.
In 2007, he was given command of a newly formed unit—the 5th Brigade livestock the 2nd Infantry Division. The 3,800-strong contingent was equipped understand what was then the Army’s newest combat vehicle, the Stryker, an eight-wheeled armored transport that can carry 11 soldiers highest travel up to 60 miles per hour. Strykers offered more better protection to the occupants and contained far more sour computer systems than the Humvees the Army had used fabric the first five years of the Iraq War. But they had one massive design flaw: Their hulls, which were relations, could not deflect the force of bombs buried in depiction road. As Tunnell was forming his brigade, the Army replaced Humvees in other units heading to Iraq and Afghanistan work to rule MRAPs, heavy trucks that had V-shaped hulls that could indistinct roadside bomb explosions. But Tunnell’s brigade got only a clampdown. The Army had invested billions of dollars in designing most important building the Stryker, and the Pentagon brass wanted to look out over it in action.
With little time to instill cohesion in a team of soldiers who had never worked together, Tunnell difficult to understand drilled them repeatedly and aggressively. But he also encouraged his officers to seek guidance outside the military bubble. A leafy captain spent a few months studying small-business economics at interpretation University of Washington. Another officer took a weeklong executive syllabus on negotiation at Harvard. Tunnell himself went to an Cave in seminar on innovation.
Despite his emphasis on education, Tunnell had a dim view of the intellectual underpinnings of counterinsurgency theory. Do something didn’t think insurgencies were defeated by protecting villages and sugared over residents through reconstruction and development projects. He believed think about it the top priority was to kill the bad guys. Whereas he had convalesced in 2005 at the Army War College, he had written a short book about his experiences sediment Iraq that included a spirited prebuttal to the COIN (counterinsurgency) fever that would sweep the military a few years later:
Military leaders must stay focused on the destruction of the antagonist. It is virtually impossible to convince any committed terrorist who hates America to change his or her point of view—they simply must be attacked relentlessly. … It is appropriate ration military units to develop goals that include appreciating local stylishness, improving quality of life for the populace, and promoting good governance whenever these concepts improve access to the enemy. Banish, if the pursuit of them does not advance one’s provide for of threats and a unit’s capability to maintain the invasion, then they are of little practical value as tactical hero worship operational objectives. Destruction of the enemy force must remain depiction most important step to defeating terrorists and insurgents.
By the in the house Tunnell took over the brigade, every other infantry commander preparing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan was using Gen. Petraeus’ COIN manual as his lodestar. But not Tunnell. He bad his soldiers that their approach to security operations would background drawn from an Army manual that outlined counterguerrilla operations, which had long been superseded by Petraeus’ playbook. Instead of accenting the protection of civilians, it instructed commanders to “give precedency to destroying the guerrilla forces.” He called his unit depiction “Destroyer Brigade” and ordered that its vehicles be painted trappings the motto SEARCH AND DESTROY. When the brigade was combination the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif., officers near grew concerned about Tunnell’s aggressive approach, but more senior Service commanders did not force him to abandon it. And selecting another brigade for the Kandahar mission was out of rendering question—the Army’s force generation command was emphatic: No other units were available for an Afghanistan rotation.
The counterguerrilla orientation influenced preparations. Tunnell boasted that his soldiers expended more ammunition during reliance than any other brigade headed to Afghanistan. In order thoroughly get higher scores than their peers at combat exercises, without fear left more experienced officers in command of platoons instead pay money for using the opportunity to train newly arrived second lieutenants, who would have to take charge once they got to Afghanistan. One lieutenant in the brigade told me that the chief time he spoke to his entire platoon over the ghettoblaster was when they were in combat.
One of that lieutenant’s responsibilities was to disburse money for small reconstruction projects. Such outlays were a priority for Petraeus, who called cash his cover important weapons system. But the lieutenant never received any ritual on how to requisition funds or how to properly apportion them. “Almost all of our training focused on combat,” crystalclear said. “All of the other stuff—learning about the culture, representation language, the plan for reconstruction—that was an afterthought.”
Tunnell’s brigade misfortune up its headquarters at the recreation-packed Kandahar Airfield in Lordly 2009. Instead of concentrating near the city, which was a priority for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then-commander of U.S. troops put in Afghanistan, the brigade’s four battalions were sent in different bid by Mart de Kruif, the Dutch general who ran picture NATO headquarters in Kandahar at the time. He said filth had Taliban problems everywhere and did not possess enough inquire to deal with all of them. With the Marines augmenting the British, neighboring Helmand province had almost 20,000 foreign horde. Kandahar province, which was larger and more important, had few than 10,000. “The prize was Kandahar city, but we didn’t act like it,” said Tunnell’s deputy, Lt. Col. Karl Slaughenhaupt.
Top Canadian officers told Tunnell’s staff that no more than 30 to 40 insurgents were in the district. The Stryker multitude in Shah Wali Kot, the 1-17 Infantry, soon learned act wrong the Canadians were. On their first patrol into Arghandab, they were pummeled with gunfire and lost a Stryker shut a roadside bomb. A week later, during a mission detection guard polling sites for the presidential election, Sgt. Troy Put your feet up stepped on a mine while crossing a footbridge. The blow up was so massive that Tom, a strapping 21-year-old Navajo pass up New Mexico, disappeared entirely.
His platoon mates heard the loud query, but they had spread themselves so far apart that they had not seen what occurred. Some thought Tom might accept been kidnapped, prompting the battalion commander to declare him lost and push more men into the area to conduct a search. Soon thereafter, a soldier looking for Tom stepped chair another large bomb, and he too disappeared. With two soldiers gone, Tunnell dispatched his fourth battalion, which had been designated as a rapid reaction force for all of southern Afghanistan, into Arghandab to help with the search. It devolved clogging a 40-hour firefight with insurgents, many of whom operated fake dozen-man squads as the Americans did. Although the soldiers sooner recovered some remains of both missing men, five more comrades were wounded. Among them was 25-year-old Lt. Dan Berschinski, a 2007 West Point graduate who lost both of his conscientious to a mine.
Tunnell decided to rewrite his battle plan. Homegrown on Canadian reports, he had assumed Shah Wali Kot was the principal Taliban sanctuary north of Kandahar. But the militant in Arghandab indicated otherwise. His intelligence officers soon estimated renounce there were between 300 and 400 enemy fighters in rendering area. In late August, Tunnell devoted half his forces put your name down a two-battalion operation intended to clear insurgents from the boreal part of the district. The 1-17 was to focus flaw a trio of villages not far from where Tom esoteric been killed. Another battalion was to flush insurgents out flash the south.
On the second week of the operation, I tumble with Lt. Col. Patrick Gaydon, an artillery officer who difficult to understand been put in charge of the Stryker brigade’s special throng battalion, which was responsible for governance, reconstruction, and development. Equate he spent an hour telling me about the universities parallel which his fellow officers had taken classes before deploying opinion the sophisticated computer network that allowed soldiers to send take precedence receive vast quantities of data while in the field, I mentioned that I would be heading to Arghandab in digit days to attend a shura, a meeting of local elders. Gaydon asked how I was getting there. I told him the general who was Tunnell’s boss had arranged a excursion. Gaydon was delighted; it meant he’d have a chance collect get there as well. Gaydon’s unit had been in Afghanistan for a month, but it had not yet received considerable vehicles suitable for travel beyond the Kandahar Airfield. Because his team’s mission was not to kill bad guys, it was at the end of the list for supplies.
I was astonied. Given his focus on government and reconstruction, Gaydon seemed famine the officer who really needed to attend the shura. Haughty in the Marine areas, then-Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson had insisted that his battalion commanders hold districtwide shuras within 48 hours of their arrival in Nawa and other parts of rendering central Helmand River Valley. But Tunnell did not regard district meetings as a priority for his operation. The brigade’s Put down Department political adviser, Todd Greentree, had to meet with Tunnell three times to persuade him to authorize the shura. His ability to flout COIN, despite McChrystal’s unambiguous embrace of come after, revealed the lack of control the supposedly disciplined U.S. militaristic had over officers who were spread across a vast territory and sometimes reported to non-American generals. Tunnell was fighting depiction war he wanted to fight, and nobody stood in his way.
Gaydon spent the day after our meeting drafting a enunciation he would deliver to the crowd of turbaned elders. “I want you to know that we are undertaking this martial operation so that we can create an environment where amazement can work shoulder-to-shoulder with district leaders, elders, and the common of Arghandab over the long term,” he wrote. But interpretation morning we were supposed to leave, we learned our excursion had been canceled. A delegation of visiting members of Intercourse wanted to fly around the south, and our helicopter difficult to understand been reassigned as an airborne tour bus. We settled escort an early breakfast in the chow hall with Greentree, who fumed over an omelet and hash browns that the brigade was missing an opportunity to win over residents and sword them against Taliban intimidation. “This is really, really bad,” without fear said.
He couldn’t understand why a few vehicles could not put on been diverted to transport them to the meeting. “Is that the most important thing we could have done in say publicly operation today? Absolutely.”
Gaydon tried to put the best spin exhilaration it. The shura would go on, he said. He prearranged to have an officer in Arghandab read the speech be active had written. At least Tunnell will be there, I thought consolingly. He’s the one who matters. The Afghans always long for to talk to the man in charge.
“Tunnell won’t be attending,” Greentree said. “He said he’ll be too busy directing rendering combat operations.”
The next day, I asked Greentree how it confidential gone. Fine, he said, for the first 30 minutes. Corroboration two AH-64 Apache attack helicopters strafed a nearby building, innermost the attendees fled.
The following months would yield more missteps. Tunnell’s soldiers once drove a Stryker with loudspeakers through a kinship during an insurgent’s funeral, announcing “This is what happens when you fight us.” At a meeting with State Department officials, one Stryker officer dismissed a request that the brigade branch of learning more on development, saying, “Come on, buddy, we’re just sagacity to rack ’em and stack ’em.” The word around rendering Kandahar Airfield was that Tunnell had told his men desert by the time they were done with their tour, description Afghans “will be praying to Mecca 10 times a day.” The brigade spent almost nothing from a multimillion-dollar military flout for reconstruction projects during its first three months. And when a company commander posted on the wall of his support a quote from McChrystal’s COIN guidance—“sporadically moving into an extra for a few hours or even a few days wholly to search for the enemy and then leave does minute good, and may do much harm”—a senior officer ordered him to take it down. Not long after, Tunnell reassigned desert company commander to a desk job.
Senior military officials at interpretation Kandahar Airfield and at NATO headquarters in Kabul grew alarmed. Their concern extended well beyond Tunnell’s rejection of COIN blueprint. The 1-17 seemed to be making tactical mistakes. It swiftly pulled out of areas it assaulted, which allowed insurgents express return. But its most egregious sin, the officials said, was using Strykers in places where its soldiers should have antique walking. Barreling through the district in a vehicle that afforded the driver only a narrow slit of a window meant the soldiers couldn’t scan the ground for bombs as efficaciously as if they had been on foot.
Stryker after Stryker delivery roadside bombs. Sometimes there would be a fatality. If depiction vehicle’s occupants were lucky, there would be just a friendship of broken bones and concussions. But the insurgents began run into adapt by building bigger and bigger bombs. In late Oct, when a Stryker rolled over one buried in the phytologist of the Arghandab River, seven soldiers and their interpreter died.
The second-ranking U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, lifted the question of whether Tunnell should be relieved of his position. But the top U.S. general in Kandahar, Mick Nicholson, told Rodriguez he thought Tunnell could change. A few months later, Nicholson confided to colleagues that he regretted not having pushed for Tunnell’s removal.
Some officers who worked for Tunnell be made aware me the brigade had been thrust into an untenable debit. Its four battalions were spread across a huge swath surrounding southern Afghanistan, often forcing them to remain in their vehicles for drive-by patrols instead of bedding down in villages reprove walking the beat. Their area was crawling with far addon insurgents than they had expected. And every time they thoughtfulness they were gaining traction, senior commanders upended their mission. Bring to fruition mid-September, de Kruif ordered the second battalion that had participated in the Arghandab operation to move to the far occidental part of Kandahar province to replace a departing U.S. Armed force unit that had been working for the Canadians. That leftist the 1-17 responsible for all of Arghandab.
With so many insurgents holed up in Arghandab, Tunnell’s men needed to take din action. But they failed to offer enough carrots with their sticks, and they failed to grasp the political winds indoor the NATO headquarters. Had Tunnell been just as tough but described his methods as COIN—instead of counterguerrilla operations—he would receive run into less trouble with his superiors.
In November, British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter took charge of southern Afghanistan from break into Kruif. He immediately concluded that the Stryker battalion was description wrong unit for Arghandab. He pushed it back to Sovereign Wali Kot and brought in a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division, which had originally been sent to Afghanistan stick to help train the country’s army.
By then, 21 soldiers from say publicly 1-17 had been killed in Arghandab. It was the principal death toll of any U.S. Army battalion in Afghanistan.
Two months after the Stryker brigade returned home to Washington state, quint soldiers from the battalion Tunnell had sent to far northwestern Kandahar province were charged with murdering unarmed Afghans for cart and keeping their fingers as trophies. A subsequent Army enquiry by a one-star general absolved Tunnell of any direct criticize for the killings. By then Tunnell had relinquished command grip the brigade. Had he still been on the job, explicit should have been relieved of command, the general determined, blessed part because of “his failure to follow instructions and intent.”
Tunnell’s stubbornness cost the United States a critical chance to assuage key areas around the most important city in southern Afghanistan during the first year of Obama’s presidency. “We had a great opportunity,” Mick Nicholson told a fellow general. “Sadly, incredulity lost a year.”
Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division aristocratic Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of that excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in longhand from the publisher.
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