arghandab river valley casualties
Jesse Rosenfield, U.S. The Arghandab river after which the district is named supplies most of the water for the city and some of its districts. “We trained [in] urban fighting in Iraq and then they give us Afghanistan,” said Staff Sgt. It never occurred to me that I'd later be analyzing the author's operational decisions amidst accusations that he "doesn't get COIN.") They were not trained to the terrain in Afghanistan because they were not intended to go there. -- and not from the simple fact of his diversion from COIN orthodoxy. Joel Kassulke of Charlie Company, which had suffered the most deaths — 12 men — of the four companies. A major change in leadership can be a big event in a unit's life, I wish the new leadership all the best in their mission and in leading that BN.Best, Rob. “There’s definitely a disconnect between the platoon and company level and the battalion and brigade level,” said a Charlie Company soldier in a leadership position, who requested he remain anonymous. No question they had the on-call capability to tick the bad guys off. A million people live in the province of Kandahar. “[W]hen it comes to the enemy, you have leadership, supply chains and formations. And given the nature of the actual threat and terrain, it's hard to see what mowing that particular grass could ever accomplish; especially given that the population could be seen as basically neutralist/on the fence before the US arrival, no sweep-and-go approach was ever going to gain enough targetable int to justify the costs to goodwill and ones own resources.We Canadians tried that approach in Zhari next door, which is very similar terrain-wise, for two years before giving up. The climate in his company as described by Naylor was one of nearly open dissent (if not defiance) against the directives of Neumann and Tunnell. There was never any way to hold the territory swept, either (otherwise we'd have been there already), so six months later the next reserve battalion would just mow the grass again.I sometimes wished they'd taken those awesome reserve battalions I worked with and instead of planning and executing those brilliant multi-stage region-wide sweeps of empty compounds, hadparcelled their personnel out a little more instead. They always showed up ready for a fight even when their Afghan police didn't. The Canadians had some trouble, apparently, from what I've gleaned from my reading. If he can think that and be allowed to command, then there is something wrong with the command structure.As for counter-guerilla operations, I am all for them. We’re going to have to forget the Afghan National Army if we are going to focus in winning the campaign. So, was that insurgent capability there all along, and the only difference is there were just more targets in the traps to strike (all those nice juicy Strykers) now? They died August 30, 2010, in the Arghandab River Valley, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked their unit with an improvised explosive device. Point being, the population may be fence-sitting right now to stay safe, but are probably pretty receptive to efforts to bring them onside.Second, the causal mechanism for COIN is not secure the population > provide good governance > win hearts and minds > gain information > defeat insurgency in local area. However, this all begs some serious questions from an analytical point of view. “We have done a lot of kinetic, enemy-focused missions and the soldiers were definitely trained to do that.". Firefights in Arghandab (and Kandahar generally) have been extremely rare since 2006.So maybe the first unit was a victim of bad int or bad prep. This is the Arghandab River valley, a few miles west of Kandahar city. All in all, the 1-320th suffered seven killed and 83 wounded, with nearly 70 percent of those casualties coming from homemade bombs and mines. He directed an investigation of all the unit's previous briefs and found them to be outside of what he perceives as Army values calling them borderline sexist and racist. Make sure their weapons remain on safe.”. Neumann said civil development was hardly the first option in a heavy combat zone, but acknowledged he could have done more to convey command thinking down the chain. DOD Identifies Army Casualties. Author, shoot me a text if you want to follow up on this and want more information about the valley as a whole or any particular aspect of it. But the battalion commander in question evidently disagreed with that analysis and acted accordingly until Carter pulled the unit out.I was suprised to see Jenio flat-out state that his unit was a "helluva lot more aggressive" than 1-17, though. Anybody seen one? The injured U.S. soldier was evacuated to a waiting Blackhawk UH-60A helicopter by Task Force Thunder Brigade, Charlie … JAG retained the counseling statement I wrote on one Soldier (he was an E-4, his wife was an E-5 in the same company) in which I wrote something along the lines of "no rational person would ever defend you in this matter unless she was married to you". There's some contradictory information here, too: some say that the problem was that the unit trained for urban warfare and ended up operating in different terrain, while others (notably battalion commander LTC Jonathan Neumann) suggest the opposite: The second possible complaint is that the brigade trained for one mission set and ended up doing exactly that, in spite of the fact that many soldiers and junior leaders feel the situation called for a different mission and mode of operation.