A Different Perspective On Rules Of Engagement And McChrystal?
BY Herschel Smith
14 years, 3 months ago
Courtesy of Andrew Exum:
From that day forward, I watched as the war slowly fell apart at the hands of our Army’s middle management — typified by that battalion commander. Case and point, GEN McChrystal’s tenure in Afghanistan. To me, the most compelling part of the Rolling Stone article is the scene where a sergeant down range writes an email to McChrystal stating he believes GEN McChrystal doesn’t get the war and has ordered policies that are killing men on the front lines. GEN McChrystal gets on the next flight to this sergeant’s FOB and goes on patrol with the sergeant’s unit. Afterwards, he holds an After Action Review with the sergeant and his men in the outpost’s makeshift chowhall. During the AAR he notices a laminated list posted on the chowhall’s wall that reads something like “Rules of Engagement As Ordered By COMISAF.” Upon reading the list, McChrystal says aloud “these aren’t my rules.” And thus my point, somewhere between GEN McChrystal issuing orders and the point at which these front line soldiers received them, the Army’s middle management bureaucracy altered them to be significantly risk adverse (sic).
This is a first hand account, anecdotal, but I presume reliable, concerning a surprise for General McChrystal concerning how his rules were applied. So does this account rehabilitate McChrystal’s image (which seems to be its point)?
I will grant the proposition that staff and field grade officers (at least some of them) were risk adverse (sic – averse). I will grant the proposition that there were modifications, amendments, clarifications, additional stipulations, and so on and so forth, in the unit-level ROE as compared to the theater-specific ROE, just as there is between the standing ROE of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the theater-specific ROE.
What I refuse to grant is that any of this “altered them to be significantly risk adverse.” McChrystal’s ROE were risk averse to begin with, and a recapitulation of the rules of engagement will show that missions had to end because there was a “chance” that an illumination round would fall on a domicile. When the Marines went into Marjah, General Rodriguez attempted to micromanage an entire Marine Air-Ground Task Force like they were children. “Less than six hours before Marines commenced a major helicopter-borne assault in the town of Marja in February, Rodriguez’s headquarters issued an order requiring that his operations center clear any airstrike that was on a housing compound in the area but not sought in self-defense.” Listen to that again. Rodriguez’s operation center had to approve offensive air strikes. Seriously. You simply can’t make this stuff up.
The problems came from the top.
“If you are in a situation where you are under fire from the enemy… if there is any chance of creating civilian casualties or if you don’t know whether you will create civilian casualties, if you can withdraw from that situation without firing, then you must do so.”
I can compute the probability that a falling satellite will land on McChrystal’s head, and it is non-zero. Thus, there is a “chance” of that happening. This guidance is stupid, issued by stupid men, applied in a stupid campaign if that’s the way it is going to be conducted. Are the staff and field grade officers (and their JAGs) responsible for the ROE? Yes. Should the men at Joyce (who made the decision to deny air support to the Marines as Ganjgal) have spent time in Leavenworth? Yes.
Does any of this obviate the responsibility McChrystal had for the ROE? No, not one bit. This isn’t an either-or proposition, it is both-and. And frankly, we don’t seem to have learned our lessons.
The number of British soldiers being shot dead in Afghanistan is spiralling as new tactics ban them from shooting at the Taliban until they are fired at themselves.
Eleven have been killed by enemy gunfire in Helmand in the past three months compared with two in the same period during 2011.
Soldiers blame efforts to slash the number of civilian casualties ordered by the US general in command of Coalition forces.
The Ministry of Defence yesterday denied the rules of engagement for British troops had changed.
But a spokesman for Coalition forces said British soldiers were told to change procedures after a tactical review.
Troops yesterday said they are now more vulnerable at road-junction checkpoints or while patrolling Taliban heartlands.
They say that previously they could shoot first but are now allowed only to return fire.
One corporal said: “When I arrived in Helmand, my officers said our tactics were going to change. They said if I saw somebody carrying a rifle or a rocket launcher, I shouldn’t fire at him. Only if he shot at me or a member of my patrol, and I could see a muzzle flash, could I use my weapon.
“I was shocked and so were my mates. We are trained to close in and kill the enemy, not to let him stroll on, watch us and let him choose the best time to ambush us.
Absurd. Even if you argue that the head of a family ought to be allowed to carry a personal defense weapon, an RPG doesn’t fit that category. We still have good men deployed in Afghanistan, and we are letting the enemy “choose the best time to ambush us.”
How utterly sad and despicable.
The crappy part is, it’s been going on for years……
I am not comfortable with the term “risk averse” for battalion commanders. I have never been to Afghanistan, but the battalion commanders I deployed to Iraq with in 1/7, 1/3, and 2/2 where all hard charging individuals who put their Marines ahead of personal advancement and comfort.
Risk averse implies that the commander would rather tighten the rules to prevent a kinetic incident that might reflect badly on him, but in doing so risks the lives of the troops. As Michael Yon has pointed out, the battalion commander is the “coach on the sideline,” the man with command authority over a whole area of operations who can still feel the battle space and give you an accurate account of what’s happening.
Are there battalion commanders who are poor leaders of men who should never hold those positions? Absolutely, the army and Marine Corps are large organizations who select commanders through board processes that are riddled with politics, favoritism, and other problems. But people that stick around this gun club tend to do so for love of others who wear the same funny looking outfits.
I think this is how we close the loop on McChrystal. He went to that FOB, went on patrol, came back, and sees the poster. Does he return to Kabul, read the riot act to his staff, and make sure that his guidance is properly enforced? No. The Rolling Stone article (and following book) make clear that the staff is obsessed with power points, hour long briefings and meetings, and personality worship. Assuming things are half as bad as the author makes them out, it is still not a place that could take dynamic action to correct what potentially where lethal misstatements. McChrystal was not the leader for the war. The men around him had no place being in the positions of power they were in.
ROE issued by the theater commander (General Mathis in this case) are broad guidance, and they never abrogate the right to self defense. If there continue to be officers and leaders in the field who do not understand that, then the problem has become institutional, the discussion of Afghanistan academic (It is, I understand that), and we should turn our attention to undoing the damage that a decade of poorly conceived and executed war has done to our nations armed forces.
MarineOfficer,
Your response is interesting, and I don’t per se disagree with any of it. I want to say, though, that it is never, EVER acceptable to use a contact e-mail:
dontcontactme@gmail.com
This is insulting to the webmaster, i.e., me. I maintain strict security over contact information, and many active duty members of the military have entrusted their names and contact information to me. It’s one way to know that the comments aren’t spam. Thus far, between Spam Karma and me, we have had to spam almost 50,000 comments. It’s stunning, actually, what happens when you give folks a forum. Also, given your IP address, I am somewhat skeptical that you’re active duty (I know of no base or other Marine Corps facility where you are).
But I will give you the benefit of the doubt. As to your comment, I guess I would go the additional steps to say that it has to do with more than just self defense. Of course there is the inherent right to self defense. There couldn’t NOT be that right, regardless of the specific ROE.
The point is that offensive actions aren’t taken under certain ROE, and in the case of McChrystal’s rules, they sound more like OSHA requirements in American industry than ROE designed for combat. As to whatever rules the British are currently operating under, to refuse to allow them to shoot (offensively) at men carryng RPGs means that it is past time to come home and stay until we do what you recommend in the final sentence of your comment.
Finally, the ROE don’t consider the doctrine of “jus in bello” when they don’t allow us to kill men carryng RPGs. It is legitimate to kill these actors regardless of whether it is in self defense. Self defense is irrelevant to the situation.
Herschel, While I apologize that you find my (admittedly fake) address offensive, I will continue to use it for my own personal safety/security reasons. I will also say that I find it odd that a man of your technical ability, resources, and knowledge of the corps did not do a bit of cross-referencing, as your knowledge of my IP, with looking through MARADMINS would allow you narrow down who I am to 1 of about 8 officers stationed in this particular county over the last couple of years. I do not mean to turn this into a discussion about the Marine Corps, but since there could be other people, and this topic could come up again, allow me a brief discourse. There are the big places you find Marines (The DC-Quantico area, Southern California, the Carolina coast, 29 Palms, Hawaii, Japan), the small ones (Norfolk, VA area, Kingsbay, Georgia, Albany, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, Barstow, California, Yuma, Arizona, Beaufort, SC and several other remote outposts where MarDets are part of schools, major commands, etc. Then we have the 6 Marine Corps Recruiting Districts (although the headquarters of 2 are aboard the Depots), and their subordinate 48 Recruiting Stations, spread across the nation, each of which has around 12-15 Substations (your own Charlotte area features 3, Gastonia, Charlotte, and Monroe). Furthermore, the RS’s contain Officer Selection Stations. There are Marine Officers serving in Military Entrance Processing Stations as CO’s, XO’s, and OPSO’s (again, Charlotte has one of these, although I do not believe a Marine currently in a senior staff billet). Then we have active duty Marines on I&I duty in the reserves, spread across most of this nation, with Charlotte, Greenville, Charleston, and Columbia all checking in. When you say “no base or other Marine Corps facility where you are,” I think you do the Marines of the local RS, reserve unit, and joint schools a disservice. Last but not least in the larger discussion regarding “where Marines are” are people like myself, on independent duty, assigned usually through a MARADMIN after being selected for one program or another, be it educational, fellowship, joint or combined assignment. I am not offended by you “questioning” my status as an Active Duty Marine Officer, after all that’s why I carry my CAC with me. To return to the topic that brought about my initial post, and the issue of RPG’s. I would turn the question around the other way. In the United States, one can in most situations more then adequately defend one’s home with an AR-15 style weapon, such as the one you’ve frequently discussed on this website. I would argue that the same is not true in Afghanistan. An RPG may there be an appropriate weapon, especially considering that more and more we are openly saying that we will do nothing to help certain communities (the New Yorker article you linked to made this perfectly clear). That does not mean that every instance of RPG carrying becomes some kind of protected… Read more »
The “right to defend themselves.” Really? IS THAT ALL OUR TROOPS ARE ALLOWED TO DO IN AFGHANISTAN? Watch the enemy plants bombs and let them go, watch them walk away so they can plan an ambush later?
Our troops are trained WARRIORS – not PEACEKEEPERS or POLICE. If that’s what these PC bureaucrats want (police), then send in the PeaceCorps and police officers and bring our troops home now!
Not one more drop of blood should be wasted in this futile and fantasy COIN effort. The Afghan people are incapable of running their own country. We are wasting our blood and treasure!
Please join our efforts to stop this madness of strategy! http://www.facebook.com/RoE.USMilitary?ref=ts
This is nothing but deadly and stupid political correctness to its highest levels.
Marine Officer, First of all, let me give you a brief list of things that are impossible. First, it is impossible to know everything about every one of my commenters. Yes, I can spend a seemingly infinite amount of time learning everything about them and trying to ascertain the legitimacy of their remarks. But this isn’t my job. It is the job of my commenters to help me with that effort. While I have tried to monetize my blog, I have failed at that effort. I’m not even sure that I would want to do this full time. I have a day job, and I earn a living doing that just as do you. Again, your lack of trust in my as the editor in chief is unfortunate. I in the possession of hundreds of names and legitimate military domain e-mail addresses. I know that the contact page is broken. But one way to assist me in determining the legitimacy of comments is to supply e-mails in the comments block. No one sees them except me. Second, it simply isn’t possible to post everything I know about every subject in every post. I have my readers for an average of about 2.5 minutes. On the long ones for the really interested readers I have them maybe 4 minutes. That’s the nature of this – it cannot be changed, so one must learn to live with it and adapt to it. Now on from things that are impossible to the rest of my remarks. The above means that I am fully aware of all of the caveats, nuances, qualifiers, exceptions, and everything else associated with kinetic operations and ROE. I understand that there is a warp and woof to a campaign. When 2/6 went into Fallujah in 2006, they didn’t start with the Lt. Col. present at city council meetings. They started with full on, hard core, combat operations, with attendant ROE. The nature of the campaign shifted over time to satellite patrols, policing, etc. My son not only shot many men, he sat in homes and had dinner and talked with heads of families. Forget the strategic corporal. He was a strategic Lance Corporal. He killed men boating across the Euphrates River at the start of the ops, and was coupled with IP two Marines to a precinct later in the campaign. There is no need to explain to me how there is nuance. I would add that another good example of kinetic ops was the 24th MEU in Garmsir in 2008. I cover it extensively on my blog if you hunt for the right time frame. Some 400 fighters were killed, with robust ROE. They transitioned to other things by the end of the effort, only to turn over to the Brits who wanted to do things differently, and then Garmsir was lost. I cannot fathom a situation in which it is acceptable for men of military age to walk around carrying RPGs. This seems like a losing example,… Read more »
One final thing. My last comment reads like a “flow of consciousness” comment. I was (and am) in a hurry.
As to the original subject, I think that one thing you are leaving out is the vote of the people in policy. I think that it’s clear that the American public will not stand for long term, long duration population-centric COIN campaigns. In fact, as you are aware the MC view is more of do what it takes, come home, and if you need to deploy again in five years to do it again, then so be it.
One consequence of the pop-centric COIN campaign we are running is that the powers-that-be, who believe in the applicability of Western psychology to the Afghan Muslim, want to construct a society that will never, ever again be a threat to us before leaving.
This is a fool’s errand. The American public believes so, and they would be more willing to act with kinetics for a brief period of time and return to do it again if the need arises than to send the military as peace keeping officers while we pretend that a HVT program enacted by night raids by Rangers and SEALs will actually transform the society.
[…] white phosphorous to hide their retreat), it would reflect badly on the rules of engagement promulgated by Stanley McChrystal. As I’ve pointed out before, culpability isn’t an either-or in this instance, it is […]
[…] white phosphorous to hide their retreat), it would reflect badly on the rules of engagement promulgated by Stanley McChrystal. As I’ve pointed out before, culpability isn’t an either-or in this instance, it is […]