A C.I.A. Grunt’s Tale of the Fog of Secret War
So I served in the Marines from 2005-2010 and I worked in intelligence from 2010-2013. I speak Pashto and Arabic as well and would argue that people have built up the cultural and religious bugaboos to excess. We still could win, but the problem fundamentally is a lack of political will here to accept the costs of making war.<p>Those costs being:<p>1. Time - rotating green units in every 9-12 months and veteran units out is a recipe for failure. They have to relearn everything and rebuild any trust you build up with local leaders. The closest we got to that was 2 year deployments of reservists, which was effective in Iraq.<p>2. Casualties - holing up in a FOB for fear of KIAs does not help the locals. Another example is Bergdahl. We spent countless hours and millions of dollars looking for a single MIA private. Everything else went on the backburner for months and it did cost lives, but it served as PR that we were doing something to recover one screw-up in a war involving millions.<p>3. Governance vs Headhunting - Drones are great at cheap effective kinetic action, but worthless in police functions. We emphasize drones along with low-quantity troop deployments, because murderbot losses do not matter and SF casualties are bucketed as volunteers. I could go further into the detriments of cannibalizing your best soldiers from line units, but that&#x27;s a whole other issue. To stabilize a country like Afghanistan you need to get violence down to zero long enough for a generation to know what peace looks like. To do that you need to prove that you are there to govern, that means deploying troops&#x2F;police in massive numbers and a court system that works. We spent too much time seeking out werewolves to shoot silver bullets at, playing whack-a-mole.<p>There is an intense focus by politicians on casualty numbers. We&#x27;ve been doing it on the cheap, but cheap adds up if you don&#x27;t win and the wars go on for decades. I don&#x27;t see that changing unfortunately.