America's Secret War by George Friedman

Author:George Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385514101
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Boots on the Ground

The United States fully shared the Taliban analysis, and understood the fundamental obstacles in attacking Afghanistan. The United States also knew that it had to act and didn't have enough time. It knew that it had to depend on the Northern Alliance and that the Northern Alliance could not defeat the Taliban alone. It knew that imprecise bombardment would not achieve anything. The United States knew it had a serious problem.

The solution to the problem was the Special Forces that began arriving in Uzbekistan shortly after the bombing began on October 6. The United States had the ability to destroy anything it chose. But aircraft, flying at 15,000 feet, couldn't possibly see the targets that needed to be destroyed in Afghanistan. The U.S. needed eyes on the ground to achieve that. The eyes belonged to combat air controllers.

Combat air controllers were the critical military specialty for the United States in Afghanistan. In a very real sense, the entire campaign rested on a handful of men drawn from the Air Force and Naval Aviation whose specialty was calling in air strikes. There were never more than a few dozen of these men deployed in Afghanistan, but they were the ones who enabled airpower to be effective. Calling in an air strike consists of more than simply designating the target. It also requires a selection of munitions appropriate to the target, a vector of attack to minimize the chance of friendly casualties, rapid damage assessment, and so on. Sometimes a laser designator is used to pinpoint the target for laser-guided munitions. Sometimes when he lases the target, the target shoots back. The combat air controller not only has to be skilled at his own trade, he also has to be able to operate as an infantryman. He walks to his target.

In order for him to be effective, he has to get close. U.S. Navy SEAL teams and British, Australian, and New Zealand SAS served in many cases on long-range reconnaissance that culminated in calling in air strikes on targets—particularly in the first two weeks of war, after the air strikes began but before Special Forces were on the ground. However, for the CAC to be effective, he had to be delivered to his observation point and then had to be protected while he did his work.

The air strikes were not stand-alone attacks but were linked to assaults from Northern Alliance forces. Therefore, if the CACs were to do their jobs and the Northern Alliance was to exploit the damage being done by the air strikes, someone had to tie these two together. The mission of carrying out this kind of warfare falls to the U.S. Army's Special Forces. They had gathered in Uzbekistan, some coming in from their bases in the United States, others from Jordan where they were completing a training exercise. These forces would later be inserted in the south, around Kandahar, in support of the future president, Hamid Karzai.

Special Forces teams began moving toward Uzbekistan as the first bombs started to drop and prepared to move into Afghanistan by the middle of October.

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