One Hundred Victories by Robinson Linda

Author:Robinson, Linda [Robinson, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2013-08-11T14:00:00+00:00

After a long military career and a decade at war, Hansell’s company sergeant major, J. R. Jones, was steeled to accept the loss of men and decisions that went against the views of soldiers on the ground. It was all office politics to him, or “militics,” as another senior noncommissioned officer dubbed it. But others who were less stoic had a harder time swallowing what had happened: it was heartbreaking to lose men because commanders could not come together around the right plan. Special forces tended to view themselves as the stepchildren of the army, unloved by their “big army” brothers, but that fatalism did not help solve the problems created by a dual chain of command.{107}

Jones took a long view of the special operations effort in Afghanistan: he had spent most of the past decade in that country. He was emphatically in favor of building local police, but, like Chris, he doubted that the special operators would have enough time to make a local police force succeed in Afghanistan. “We did this hamlet program first in Vietnam,” Jones said. “But we are working on a compressed timeline here.” He ticked off the benefits of local defense forces. “The local police know what is going on. They tell us who is who. The conventional [US] forces do not see what is going on. They do not know which ones are carrying guns or planting bombs,” he said. The Afghan army could not do the job alone, he added, especially in a rural insurgency. “You can’t just surround the enemy and squeeze him in a rural fight like this. If you don’t have police and government, you will not win,” he said. But time was the critical ingredient: the triad of competent army, police, and government could not be built overnight.

Although Jones often self-deprecatingly referred to his Mississippi origins, he spoke with authority grounded in his training and experience in war zones. Jones, Navarro, and Jones’s company commander, Angel Martinez, had not only been in and out of Afghanistan for a decade. During that same decade, when they were not in Afghanistan, they had been deployed to Colombia. The two experiences offered a stark contrast. The three men had been intimately involved in what turned out to be a successful mission in Colombia that was little known outside the circle of special operators who had spent time there, patiently assisting every branch of the Colombian military and its special police units at every level all over the country. They had helped to build a proficient special operations brigade in a comprehensive and continuous program carried out with a few hundred American advisers, and they had supplied advisers to other units and commands. The US government had also sent development aid, helicopters, and counternarcotics assistance totaling about $7 billion over the decade—a large amount in terms of the US foreign assistance budget, but a pittance compared to the cost of the war in Afghanistan.

Colombia had been transformed dramatically. The once besieged government

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