Soldier Secretary by Christopher C. Miller & Ted Royer

Author:Christopher C. Miller & Ted Royer [C. Miller, Christopher & Royer, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

The sun was dropping behind the mountain as we shambled up the trail. It was kind of reminiscent of the Alps in The Sound of Music, but without the flowers or the singing. We crested the next peak and found ourselves on a very restrictive ridgeline, with a steep drop off on either side. It was the perfect place to make camp for the night.

It didn’t surprise me that the Special Forces Major that was commanding the Task Force offered my Afghan colleagues and me the distinguished honor of manning the portion of the perimeter closest to the enemy. It reinforced my suspicion that he considered us little more than cannon fodder.

The Afghans were all relaxed—a good sign that we wouldn’t have to fight in the near term. I didn’t know Shah intimately, but the fact that he was still alive indicated that he was a savvy operator. Insurgents that live long enough to make a name for themselves usually follow, formally or intuitively, Mao Zedong’s guerilla warfare maxim of only fighting when the conditions are in their favor.

But, in fact, we had no idea what Shah was going to do. We had no meaningful intelligence on what had happened to the missing SEAL team. In the 1990s, the national security community had become obsessed with the theory that superfast computers, ubiquitous intelligence, surveillance drones, geostationary satellites, and improved communications systems would give American commanders near-perfect battlefield information and “Lift the Fog of War”—as the title of a book by Admiral Bill Owens suggested.

Military strategists have been trying to eliminate the fog of war since Jesus was a little boy. It was, and is, a pipe dream—but Owens and his acolytes postulated that America was on the verge of accomplishing this.

I had been exposed to their theories while attending the Naval War College a few years earlier. I was skeptical, but with so many high-ranking and highly revered leaders advocating such ideas, it was difficult not to get swept away by the metastasizing mania.

But now the truth was inescapable. We hadn’t heard a peep from our missing SEALS. We were the most technologically advanced military in the history of humankind, with sensors in orbit that could identify the launch of rockets, listen in on radio conversations, and identify disturbed earth from space—yet we were operating no differently than Winston Churchill in India’s Northwest Frontier Province in the late 1890s. So much for lifting the fog of war.

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