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Finally done in Afghanistan?


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1 hour ago, Pancake said:

Really? I wonder why the Chinese want in so bad. And I’m not talking natural resources.

In time, we’ll lament leaving, ostensibly giving complete freedom of movement to the Chinese, from Iran to North Korea.

Geopolitics evolves. The COIN mission was a never-ending failure that should have pivoted a decade ago. Afghanistan, frankly, is more important to US National security today than ever before, and we just handed it over to our number one peer challenger.

Silk Road Initiative.

https://afghanembassyturkmenistan.com/12-reasons-the-silk-road-through-afghanistan-is-underway/

Silk-Road-Through-Afghanistan.jpg?resize

https://www.dailypioneer.com/2021/page1/taliban-seek-air-missiles-from-china.html

[quote]

Taliban seek air missiles from China

Sunday, 01 August 2021 | PNS | New Delhi

Delegation requests Beijing to help it with electronic warfare against US bombers

The Taliban are desperate to get supplies of medium range surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) from China before the complete withdrawal of the US troops from Afghanistan in September. Afghan Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, alias Mullah Baradar, placed his desire to get SAMs before the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi at a delegation-level meeting at Tianjin on Wednesday.

“The Taliban delegation requested SAMs from China during the inter-delegation meeting headed by Baradar from the Taliban and Yi from the Chinese side,” they said.

Backed by technical inputs from the Pakistan Army-ISI complex, the Taliban have sought missiles capable of crippling the electronic warfare capabilities and jamming the radar of the American B-52 bombers as the configuration is estimated to be closely matching those of Rafale fighter jets being procured by India from France, the sources said.[/quote]

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6 minutes ago, RedEye1911 said:

We better fight them over there or we'll have to fight them over here!!! /S

1. Geopolitical enemy (USSR/China) involved on 3rd world 

2. Arm/equip Mujahadeen

3. ??

4. Profit/democracy/hearts 'n minds

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Some interesting takes on this forum.  I’ll pitch in to the fight, not that what I think matters one bit. 

Most of you are younger than me, most of you have known nothing but a career of war, many of you are sick of the endless deployments and time away from your family.  I get that, but I hope as military professionals your optic is not solely at the tactical level and how it impacts just you.  As an O-6 I was often asked to speak at Weapons School and other leadership forums.  I used to ask the audience how long they had been serving and the duration of this conflict came home when a "kid" in the audience told me he was in second grade when 9/11 happened. 

The past almost 20 years in Afghanistan will be dissected for centuries to come.  Historians will write papers on every detail from the initial invasion to the chaos as we ran away in the middle of the night.  For some of you (and for me), there will be deep feelings about what has happened and the way it went down.  In reflection there are numerous questions to ask; Should be have been in Afghanistan in the first place, was our strategy correct, what did we do right, what did we do wrong, why did we leave the way we did.  There will be endless debate on each point, there will be no right or wrong answers.  As I watch these events, I’ve tried to look back on the last 20 years remembering the context of the situation at the time decisions were made rather than be jaundice by knowing the outcome.

The first question is should we have been there.  Put aside the patriot surge of emotions and quest for vengeance after 9/11, there was a logical reason to go into Afghanistan.  Horrible people set up terror camps to training in Afghanistan and attack us at home.  Perhaps we could have sat back and tried to bomb them into oblivion, but given the context of the day that wasn’t going to happen.  The vast majority of this country wanted to invade Afghanistan...not because of fake or not fake WMD but because that was where the bad guys who attacked us were...(yes there is much that is still being covered up about the part the Saudis played).

Was our strategy correct?  I believe in American Excellence.  As messed up as we are at times we still serve as a shining beacon for the rest of the world.  That being said, not everyone wants democracy and we can’t seem to accept them some people don’t want to do the hard world that it takes to be free and live a life of self-determination.  We put PRTs all over the place and tried to build schools and wells, but we rotated people in and out and changed our strategy with each new administration and each new commander.  We build outposts of presence in places like the Korengal Valley, begging the Taliban to come fight then tore it down and moved away like it never mattered we were there.  We build them most advanced CAS stack in the world and became highly efficient at killing bad guy in close proximity to friendly forces.  We built an RPA enterprise that existed to hunt and kill bad people.  We patrolled villages and met with elders to assure them we were there to help and for the duration.  We did all of these things and so much more and yet we still lost.

Should we have left, in my opinion no.  I am sure that will anger some but at least listen to my reasoning.  For the last 20 years we have had relative peace at home…why is that?  Has our protection at the border been that much better than it was on 9/11?  There is my opinion a very simple answer and a Machiavellian strategy that we successfully employed in Afghanistan…simply put…we fought them there so we wouldn’t have to fight them here.  Afghanistan (and Iraq…and Syria), was the flame to which the evil moths were drawn.  The enemy sought to defeat the Americans on the battlefield, wear them down, end their imperial invasion.  Whether it was to establish a caliphate, protect ancient lands or to fight on their terms, they ran to the sound of our guns.  You know when folks in that part of the world watch Star Wars, we are the empire.  Our strategy was rooted in a grand strategy used in World War One…bleed them dry.  At horrific battle sites like Verdun the point was never to take territory or advance the front, it was simply to kill as many of on the other side as possible.  In fact, the strategy was summed up in a common phrase of the day, Bleed them white.”  I would argue it worked.  The 2312 Americans who died in Afghanistan bought us 20 years of relative peace at home.  In grand strategy terms, a small price to pay.

Now that the flame has gone out in Afghanistan we should ask some very important questions and I don’t think we will like the answers.

Do you think peace is going to break out?...no more deployments…all is going to be great…candy canes and unicorns right?

Are they (and others), emboldened to come after us now that they defeated us over there?

What is our standing in the world community?  We literally ran away in the middle of the night.

Will anyone ever trust us again?  We abandoned them, anyone who ever helped us will most certainly pay a horrible price, what lesson did that teach the rest of the world.

I crossed that fence 179 times and if I close my eyes I can still hear the sounds, I can smell the cordite, I can hear the voices on the radio, I can hear the guns firing  and I can still see the sights 20 years later.  Afghanistan will be with me until I die, it is the same for many of you.  Whatever your views I pray that each and every one of you who set foot in the country or flew missions over it will find perspective and peace. 

Afghanistan, where all great empires go to die. 

 

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1 hour ago, ClearedHot said:

Should we have left, in my opinion no.

Well said.

Tactically, Afghanistan was lost on the very first battle. Strategically, it’s never been more important than now. In the 14 years between my first and last deployment there, nothing changed, except China became more influential.

Our biggest weakness is our cultural intolerance to play the long game. This is the root cause of all of our military losses.

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When this shit show ends, and we start talking about Awards and Citations, the arm chair reviewers better just shut the F up and forward the DFCs for the people over there right now to do this last heavy lifting.

You’re taking a vulnerable cargo aircraft into a chaotic situation at best, parking it in front of ever Afghan who wants to escape and loading pax/refueling while the security perimeter hopefully lasts.

This is some Berlin airlift worth shit for our Cargo and heavy Helo brethren and it damn sure needs to be recognized as one of the bright spots in this total F up.


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4 hours ago, ClearedHot said:

The 2312 Americans who died in Afghanistan bought us 20 years of relative peace at home.  In grand strategy terms, a small price to pay.

The 2312 number is contentious. It doesn't include contractors or combat related suicides (which are almost 10 times the number of casualties), but for the sake of argument we'll go with 2312. I could be convinced that those numbers of casualties are worth it, if that was it. But in addition to those deaths, do you also think it was worth the $2,260,000,000,000 dollars and twenty lost years of military modernization in reference to actual peer power competitors i.e. China/Russia? 

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/27/donald-trump/did-us-spend-6-trillion-middle-east-wars/

The PLA alone has already caught up, in unclassified reports, in Ships, Missiles, and Air Defenses, among more. In many Rand studies, we have lost significant ground in dozens of areas that we had a significant advantage in only 20 years ago.

https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9858z1/RAND_RB9858z1.pdf

For reference, with $2.26T, we could have bought an entire new additional fighter platform fleet analogous to the F-35 from cradle to grave, lasting until 2070 (including development/test/operations/sustainment).

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2021-06-01/The-F-35-Joint-Strike-Fighter-the-costliest-weapon-system-in-US-military-history-now-faces-pushback-in-Congress-1618847.html

You could have bought over 17 entire carrier battle groups + air wings + personnel and operated them literally every day for 50 years.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf

You could have modernized to actually fight against the IADS, the J-20, chinese satellites, the cyber threats, anti-ship missiles, etc. We could have technologies that are relevant to peer competition. We could have replaced the E-3, the A-10, the B-52, the F-16, the EC-130, the RC-135, the AC-130, the MQ-9, the B-1, etc. The army could have upgraded the patriot. The marines and army could have developed modernized fires systems.

2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FIN

You could have modernized our outdated nuclear triad. We could have developed hypersonics on parity with our competitors. 

https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-hypersonic-missiles-methods-and-motives/

But instead we decided to try to wipe out an ideology that killed 3000 American civilians. And it didn't just stop with Afghanistan - it brought us to Iraq and Syria. I have to admit, some of those sorties seemed deeply satisfying to me, at first. It felt like I was making a difference. But every year that I was there, I realized more and more that we were getting nothing done. One poignant example was fencing in to fight a faction that, only a few years ago, I was defending. That wasn't just a single event, either. If that's not an operational/strategic miscalculation, I don't know what is.

I can agree with some folks on here that want to point out that we were successful tactically and operationally. Some really smart tacticians/operations commanders did a good job of fighting a conventional war against an unconventional combatant. But to say we had any clear strategic or grand strategy victories in the middle east is a huge stretch. FFS, we let Russia invade Crimea, and we pretended like it didn't happen.

In the end in the middle east, we didn't just give away the 7000+ uniformed deaths, the 8000+ contractor deaths, and the 30000+ military suicides after coming back home. We gave away an unfathomable amount of money, our advantage in the future fight, and a huge portion of our strategic influence.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed

Edited by Negatory
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I don’t buy into the fight them over there ideology. I’ve never seen any empirical proof.

 There have been plenty of threats that have emerged in the states (not to be scale of 9/11) that have emerged from other places.

Not to mention our Saudi “friends” have more responsibility in 9/11 than merely the geography of Afghanistan.

 The fight them over there so we don’t fight them here seems to be a justification for a sunk cost.

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46 minutes ago, Negatory said:

The 2312 number is contentious. It doesn't include contractors or combat related suicides (which are almost 10 times the number of casualties), but for the sake of argument we'll go with 2312. I could be convinced that those numbers of casualties are worth it, if that was it. But in addition to those deaths, do you also think it was worth the $2,260,000,000,000 dollars and twenty lost years of military modernization in reference to actual peer power competitors i.e. China/Russia? 

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/27/donald-trump/did-us-spend-6-trillion-middle-east-wars/

The PLA alone has already caught up, in unclassified reports, in Ships, Missiles, and Air Defenses, among more. In many Rand studies, we have lost significant ground in dozens of areas that we had a significant advantage in only 20 years ago.

https://www.rand.org/paf/projects/us-china-scorecard.html
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_briefs/RB9800/RB9858z1/RAND_RB9858z1.pdf

For reference, with $2.26T, we could have bought an entire new additional fighter platform fleet analogous to the F-35 from cradle to grave, lasting until 2070 (including development/test/operations/sustainment).

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2021-06-01/The-F-35-Joint-Strike-Fighter-the-costliest-weapon-system-in-US-military-history-now-faces-pushback-in-Congress-1618847.html

You could have bought over 17 entire carrier battle groups + air wings + personnel and operated them literally every day for 50 years.

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA575866.pdf

You could have modernized to actually fight against the IADS, the J-20, chinese satellites, the cyber threats, anti-ship missiles, etc. We could have technologies that are relevant to peer competition. We could have replaced the E-3, the A-10, the B-52, the F-16, the EC-130, the RC-135, the AC-130, the MQ-9, the B-1, etc. The army could have upgraded the patriot. The marines and army could have developed modernized fires systems.

2020-DOD-CHINA-MILITARY-POWER-REPORT-FIN

You could have modernized our outdated nuclear triad. We could have developed hypersonics on parity with our competitors. 

https://jamestown.org/program/chinas-hypersonic-missiles-methods-and-motives/

But instead we decided to try to wipe out an ideology that killed 3000 American civilians. And it didn't just stop with Afghanistan - it brought us to Iraq and Syria. I have to admit, some of those sorties seemed deeply satisfying to me, at first. It felt like I was making a difference. But every year that I was there, I realized more and more that we were getting nothing done. One poignant example was fencing in to fight a faction that, only a few years ago, I was defending. That wasn't just a single event, either. If that's not an operational/strategic miscalculation, I don't know what is.

I can agree with some folks on here that want to point out that we were successful tactically and operationally. Some really smart tacticians/operations commanders did a good job of fighting a conventional war against an unconventional combatant. But to say we had any clear strategic or grand strategy victories in the middle east is a huge stretch. FFS, we let Russia invade Crimea, and we pretended like it didn't happen.

In the end in the middle east, we didn't just give away the 7000+ uniformed deaths, the 8000+ contractor deaths, and the 30000+ military suicides after coming back home. We gave away an unfathomable amount of money, our advantage in the future fight, and a huge portion of our strategic influence.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/killed

And yet no major attacks on U.S. soil....

 

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1 hour ago, Lawman said:


When this shit show ends, and we start talking about Awards and Citations, the arm chair reviewers better just shut the F up and forward the DFCs for the people over there right now to do this last heavy lifting.

You’re taking a vulnerable cargo aircraft into a chaotic situation at best, parking it in front of ever Afghan who wants to escape and loading pax/refueling while the security perimeter hopefully lasts.

This is some Berlin airlift worth shit for our Cargo and heavy Helo brethren and it damn sure needs to be recognized as one of the bright spots in this total F up.


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A-fuckin-men. 

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1 hour ago, Negatory said:

Good words...

Concur with you on your point(s).  I would add that I respect @ClearedHot's opinion and read it and mulled on it for a while, I don't agree with it but I could not figure the why and I think I have it now. 

The argument for remaining is to defend an order, an idea for a world that no longer exists, that is a Pax Americana world order where we are the guarantor in many places for ideas, values, systems that we like and promote and want others to embrace but can't take root.  It's the order we thought would last forever plus a day at the end of the Cold War beginning of the 90's when we believed our power was infinite.  Serbia and the ethnic wars of South-Eastern Europe with our mixed results for what we were willing to commit to and convince our Allies to do should have warned us that there is only so much you can do, even as rich and as powerful as you are.  

The world where we go anywhere and bear any burden is gone, not because that is not a good or noble idea just one that we as a nation, not as individuals,  are not willing to pay for, to sacrifice for, to discipline ourselves for.  We are just not that nation, not saying we are a bad nation now, we've changed.

We have less cohesion, spiritual reserves and excess material resources to use to help others when it is not in our material national interest.  

The Serenity Prayer is what we need now and going forward as we deal with the world.

17 minutes ago, ClearedHot said:

And yet no major attacks on U.S. soil....

That is not proof of no major attacks in the US because of Iraq / Afghanistan / Libya / Syria.

There were attacks in the UK and Europe and attempts in the US with some minor attacks.  Is it because they were all "over there" or because the FBI plus others were using the Patriot Act plus much more aggressive technological means to disrupt cells & plots before they grew to fruition?  The wars following 911 distracted some terrorists but not all to attempting to attack the US homeland, it surely dissuaded some nations from overtly / tacitly supporting them and or neutrally allowing them to operate / prepare on their territory but 

Edited by Clark Griswold
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