Every Marine infantryman and parent or spouse of a Marine infantryman knows the value of a Navy Corpsman and the high esteem in which they are held by the Marines.  They are technically in the Navy (while the Marines are only part of the Department of the Navy).  They have had extensive medical training, and essentially serve as the doctors for the Marine infantry.  But these doctors aren’t just there for medicine.  They carry a rifle, they engage in combat, and they do all of the things that Marine infantrymen do.  When the Marines go on twenty mile humps with full body armor, backpacks and weapons, the Corpsmen do all of that and more.  The Corpsmen take all of their medical gear in addition to their other load.  In many units they carry the nickname “doc.”

One such Corpsman I know returned from Iraq with my son’s unit, 2/6 Golf Company, in 2007.  His last name was Prince, and he was a prince of a guy.  He was very kind and friendly, well trained, in excellent physical condition, and had absolute commitment to his fellow Marines.  He showed me his wound from Iraq within several days of returning.  A round from an AK-47 had entered through the front part of his lower thigh, ricocheted up his thigh, and exited out of the very upper part of the back of his thigh.  Entry and exit wounds (now scars) were at least a foot apart.

Corpsman Prince stayed in Iraq and did his own rehabilitation during the deployment.  The hardest thing about the experience, he told me, was getting enough pairs of clothing after each successive pair became blood stained.  The more interesting thing about what happened that day with Corpsman Prince was what happened to his fellow Marines.  He wasn’t the only one who was wounded in that engagement.  Several other Marines were also wounded, and Prince had to treat them before he could treat himself.  He did so while bleeding out.

Navy Corpsmen are worth their weight in gold, and even if the Commander in Chief isn’t smart enough to know how to pronounce their billet, we have the utmost respect for them.

From the WSJ:

In a rare break from traditional military secrecy, the U.S. and its allies are announcing the precise target of their first big offensive of the Afghanistan surge in an apparent bid to intimidate the Taliban.

Coalition officers have been hinting aloud for months that they plan to send an overwhelming Afghan, British and U.S. force to clear insurgents from the town of Marjah and surrounding areas in Helmand province, and this week the allies took the unusual step of issuing a press release saying the attack was “due to commence.”

Senior Afghan officials went so far as to hold a news conference Tuesday to discuss the offensive, although the allies have been careful not to publicize the specific date or details of the attack.

“If we went in there one night and all the insurgents were gone and we didn’t have to fire a shot, that would be a success,” a coalition spokesman, Col. Wayne Shanks, said before the announcement. “I don’t think there has been a mistake in letting people know we’re planning on coming in.”

The risks could be substantial, however. By surrendering the element of surprise, the coalition has given its enemy time to dig entrenched fighting positions and tunnel networks. Perhaps worse for the attacking infantrymen, the insurgents have had time to booby-trap buildings and bury bombs along paths, roads and irrigated fields. Such hidden devices inflict the majority of U.S. and allied casualties.

[ ... ]

At times, the U.S. took a similar tack in Iraq, signaling in advance that the 2007 troop surge there would focus on Baghdad. Likewise, Pakistan’s military telegraphed its intention last year to attack insurgents in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan.

“It is a fascinating tactical decision to advertise an assault openly before it commences,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of foreign policy research at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Analysis & Commentary

Let’s not overdo the surprise and offer too many superlatives at announcing the Marja offensive.  A similar strategy was taken for Operations al Fajr and Alljah, both in Fallujah.  The U.S. Marines have a rich history of using intimidation as one of the many tools in their bag.  My problem isn’t with announcing the offensive.  It comes at a more basic level than that.

Taking a quick detour through another perspective, Joshua Foust weighs in with a nonplussed reaction.

… there is some logic to the focus on Kandahar. It isn’t the most important city evar (sic)  (after all, the Taliban would have stopped there in 1994 if it were), but the city does have a lot of significance, if only because most Kandaharis are pissed off at our mismanagement of the place. So why do we have such a laser-focus on Helmand? Why spend all the time, resources, money, and most importantly lives to secure something no one in charge can describe as important apart from assertion?  I fear the real answer is opium.

I have also spoken strongly against targeting the poppies.  I cannot speak directly to whether the Marines are targeting poppy in Helmand at the moment, but my objections to the handling of the Marja offensive are much more basic and foundational.  If there is no one in charge who can explain why we are in Helmand, let me do it (sigh) once again.

The argument to control the streets of Kandahar makes sense if that argument doesn’t also hinge upon removing the Marines from Helmand where the fighters recruit, train, raise their support, and get ingress to and egress from Afghanistan.  In Now Zad Taliban fighters have been so unmolested that they have used that area for R&R.  The city of Now Zad – with an erstwhile population of 30,000+ civilians – is deserted with only insurgents remaining to terrorize the area so that inhabitants don’t return.  The Marines are so under-resourced that they can only fight the Taliban to a standstill.  It is so dangerous in Now Zad that the Marines deployed there are the only ones to bring two trauma doctors with them.

It is a strange argument indeed that sends Marines to Kandahar while the insurgents in Now Zad have separated themselves off from civilians and invited a fight.  So send more Marines to Kandahar to control the streets.  The Taliban bullying will stop once a Regimental Combat Team arrives.  This should not be too difficult to pull off.  As I have said before, there are so many Marines at Camp Lejeune that some units are not even in the same barracks, and more barracks are being built.  Not since the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom has the Corps been so large with so many Marines garrisoned in the states.  Furthermore, if they aren’t in the states they are on board amphibious assault docks doing nothing.  Entire Battalions of Marine infantry – doing nothing for nine months.

The only limitation on troop levels in Afghanistan comes with logistics.  But more to the point, we could put the entirety of every Army on earth in Kandahar for the next two years, and upon leaving, the Taliban who have slithered away into parts of Kandahar and Helmand would simply come back, intimidate their way to power once again, and create safe haven for globalists.  Is this so heady and difficult that someone in charge cannot explain it as Foust charges?

I do not now and have never bought into the idea of population-centric counterinsurgency (when applied as an exclusive-use procedure).  Intimidating the Taliban out of Marja (so that you can protect the population and create governance) will only displace them to somewhere else.  Their fighters must be killed if we are ever to be able to leave Afghanistan.  Playing whack-a-mole in Helmand (or Kandahar – or anywhere else) only prolongs the agony, for Afghanis and for us.

There is more logistical trouble with the supply lines through Pakistan (lines which supply approximately 85% – 90% of our needs in Afghanistan).  The first report has to do with a bridge near Peshawar.

Suspected terrorists on Thursday blew up a bridge on a link road connecting Peshawar’s Badbher village to Khyber Agency’s Bara town, officials and locals said. A police official said the blast took place at around 1:30am. The bridge over the Frontier Road was blown up as police personnel travelled through the area, the official said, adding that the terrorists escaped the scene. He said that a search was being conducted to trace the perpetrators of the blast.

The second report pertains to a tanker attack near Peshawar.

Taliban blew up a tanker carrying oil supply to NATO forces in Afghanistan on the ring road in the Chamkani police precincts early on Monday, police said. Chamkani police officials told Daily Times that an Afghanistan-bound tanker carrying oil supply for NATO forces was attacked by armed men on Monday morning. They said the assailants fired at the tanker and destroyed it with a magnet bomb.

The third report is even more important for where it occurred – the port city of Karachi.

A NATO convoy came under assault Thursday while carrying supplies through Pakistan to Afghanistan in a rare ambush inside Karachi, the relatively secure port city from which 300 to 400 of the coalition’s trucks leave each day.

Any assault on the Pakistani supply route is worrisome to the US-led forces in Afghanistan, who use it to ship three-quarters of their materials and will need it even more as the surge of 30,000 US troops progresses.

But the attack in Karachi – which is the commercial capital of Pakistan, and has largely escaped the bomb attacks troubling other major cities and the northwest – raises particular concern, especially if it marks the beginning of a trend.

From the beginning to end of the supply lines, logistics is under attack.  It still isn’t too late to do the right thing, and engage the Caucasus.

Admiral Mullen weighed in with the Senate Armed Services Committee today on DADT:

Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in an appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the military would follow the 1993 law known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Nonetheless, he said, his personal views were firm.

“Speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do,” Mullen said …

“No matter how I look at the issue,” he said, “I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.” he said.

An impassioned plea, it was.  Of course, this is technically incorrect.  Don’t ask don’t tell (DADT) means that no one lies.  You aren’t asked, and you don’t discuss it.  I have been loath to weigh in on the  issue as it has come to the forefront over the last couple of years, and I will do so only tangentially now (not weighing in on the merits or lack thereof in a particular lifestyle choice).  I have many things for which I want to be an advocate, and many notions I wish to deconstruct (such as the unproven and unsubstantiated doctrine that softer ROE necessarily wins hearts and minds).  Hot button social issues such as DADT can tend to cloud one’s judgment, making the reader dismissive to other arguments about very different and very important things.  So I don’t want you to dismiss my views on other important things because we don’t see eye to eye on DADT.

But in the end, DADT has been a mainstay of operations for a while now, and revoking this policy might mean more than a little change to the military.  It’s appropriate to convey the thoughts of at least a few contacts active in the military.  My contacts – who by the way aren’t opposed in principle to the idea of gays serving alongside them – seem to pan the idea pretty much across the board.

DADT is the perfect policy, they say.  It doesn’t prevent gays from serving in the military.  That’s just a mythical talking point of those who advocate its revocation.  DADT only prevents open discussion or practice of such things.  It is, by the way, similar to the way heterosexual relations are treated as well.  Men stay away from women altogether in uniform.  It isn’t practiced, it isn’t discussed, it is frowned upon – in theory.  This isn’t to say that it doesn’t happen, any more than DADT would imply that gay sexual relations don’t happen.  It does mean that there are certain requirements in the military that comport with good discipline, and they are enforced to the extent possible.  For a branch like the Marines which has as their cornerstone removing differences and enforcing sameness (or at least relegating them to unimportant status – e.g., no one can remove language barriers), it probably will have a significant affect.

Now for my own views.  I thought about this position within the context of the only exception that I can think of, namely, marriage.  Men and women are allowed to be married in the military.  But marriage is not performed by the Marine Corps or Army.  It is performed and recognized within and by states which have laws that govern such things.  Imposing homosexual marriage on a branch of the service just to say that there is no exception to the way gays and heterosexuals are treated under DADT is a false dilemma.  It is imposing a foreign problem on the military – a consideration that should be irrelevant to the conversation.

In a republic such as ours, laws are changed by legislative process which usually begins with advocacy.  One group or another wants a law changed or enacted, and that group presses the issue.  If gays want to marry, changing DADT isn’t the way to go.  Changing laws is the way to go.  No gay marriage (insofar as DADT applies) in the military (similar to no gay marriage in most states)  is an output (or outcome) of the debate, not an input to it.

In summary, DADT is the perfect solution to the issue.  There is to be no sexual relations with other service members, and no discussion of it.  This is true regardless of orientation.  DADT is a subset of that regulation, not an exception to it.  It doesn’t prevent gays from serving in the military.  Its revocation would serve no useful function, and therefore TCJ opposes its revocation unless someone can come up with something better than the false mantra that some service members must “lie about who they are.”

Are the rules of engagement making any difference?  They are with the Marines in Helmand.

On a base near Marjah, a Taliban stronghold in Helmand province, Marines are grieving the deaths of a sergeant and corporal killed by the remote-controlled bombs that have become the scourge of the long-running conflict.

Commanders try to keep the men’s rage in check, aware that winning over an Afghan public wary of the foreign military presence and furious about civilian casualties is as important as battlefield success.

“It causes a lot of frustration. My men want revenge – that is only natural,” says First Lieutenant Aaron MacLean, 2nd Platoon commander of the 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment Charlie company.

“But I keep telling them that the rules are the rules for a reason. If we simply go crazy and start shooting at everything, in the long run we will lose this war because we will lose the support of the population.”

He too is frustrated, accusing the Taliban of manipulating the rules of engagement by using women and children as shields and shooting from hidden positions before dropping their weapons and standing out in the open.

To regular readers of The Captain’s Journal, this isn’t news.  Recall that we said:

Based on recent communications with enlisted Marines (of various ranks), a perspective is developing around the current rules of engagement for Afghanistan.  There is no such thing as air or artillery support any more.  The ROE General McChrystal has set in place is killing Marines.  Sure, there was the ROE in Iraq, but Marines were genuinely encouraged to think for themselves, assess the situation, and ascertain the best course of action independently.  This is not being done in Afghanistan, where rules are micromanaging the tactical situation.  Many Marines with combat experience in Iraq are leaving the Corps for various reasons, but at least one reason for the exit can be traced to a lack of willingness to deploy to Afghanistan under the current circumstances.  Deploying Marines to Afghanistan are mostly inexperienced.

I stated that the ROE was causing a deleterious affect on morale in November 2009.  So as for whether the ROE are having their desired affect and winning hearts and minds of the locals, there is this report.

NANGARHAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan — As his commander greeted a local leader in a district government building recently, Air Force Technical Sgt. Tyler Woodson, 20, scurried past them and ran up three flights of stairs to the roof.

There, Woodson, of Macon, Ga., surveyed the town. He saw children playing soccer in an adjacent field, trucks traveling on the main highway and, several hundred yards away, a glorious range of mountains.

He was looking for the best place to drop a bomb from an F-16, where there was no chance of striking anyone or anything.

“See over there,” he said, pointing. “It’s flat, so there’s no chance of debris falling on anyone.”

This is the new U.S. air campaign in much of Afghanistan.

Six months after Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S commander in Afghanistan, issued a directive urging troops to walk away from a fight rather than risk killing civilians, the Air Force is engaging in a campaign of restraint.

Instead of airstrikes, airmen increasingly are searching for places they can drop bombs that can be heard and felt, but where they’re unlikely to damage buildings or hurt people.

It isn’t a universal effort. In Afghanistan’s Khost and Helmand provinces, Afghanistan’s most violent, U.S. jets more frequently drop bombs that are intended to maim and kill.

In less-conflicted areas such as Nangarhar, however, soldiers are increasingly seeking tactics other than air attacks to get them out of hairy situations. Among the alternative uses of air power: buzzing enemy positions in a show of force and shooting flares or dropping warning bombs instead of directly engaging the enemy.

Privately, ground troops see that the restraint is putting them in greater danger, and they aren’t seeing results.

Afghans seem no more willing to provide information to U.S. forces, the troops say, despite U.S. efforts to minimize civilian casualties, even in a province such as Nangarhar, where education levels are relatively high.

Dropping bombs on unoccupied terrain to make loud noises, walking away from fire fights.  But the population is no more willing to help than before.  Remember that we have discussed the unintended consequences of less robust ROE, and even recently in the context of events in Garmsir, Afghanistan.

… the Taliban feel utterly protected by being amidst the population.  While it may be backed with all of the nice intentions mankind can muster, the unintended consequences of less robust rules of engagement are that more noncombatants die.  Many, if not most, of these townsfolk would never have been there if they had believed that they were in mortal danger, and the Taliban wouldn’t have been there to instigate the event(s) if we were giving chase to them and they were running for their lives.

When townsfolk can pelt the Marines with rocks and Taliban fighters can run amok in the crowds, U.S. forces are not respected.  It’s an ominous sign – that the most feared fighting force on earth, the 911 forces of America, the most deadly, rapid and mobile strike forces of any nation anywhere, can be pelted with rocks and hit with sticks without any fear whatsoever.  This isn’t likely to ensure belief by the population that they will be “protected” by our forces.

In order to believe that the ROE is beneficial, one must believe that the higher casualties suffered now will redound to less in the future.  But this is unproven doctrine, with the ROE is Iraq more robust than it has been thus far in Afghanistan.

Loss of troop morale and no resultant benefit with the population.  You heard it here before you saw it in the battle space.