Funny.  None of that is in his de-brief post-recovery.

His vest had 11 full mags.

Enemy KIA or WIA:  0

Ask any of the 2/3 Marines Intel guys, let alone SOCCENT.  If you're basing your opinion on what happened there from:

A.  Civilian perspective

B. Watching the movie

You're going to be in the dark with a lot of preconceptions that simply don't match with reality.

Why is your convoy leaving the wire with one working radio?

ETA: Are they a SEALs convoy?

Well if I am a TOC roach I am not wasting time on the net coordinating an air show.  I had 4 subordinate teams spread throughout the province.  I spent more time listening to assist or rolling a QRF than I did fighting.

You were out of the fight and injected yourself to feel important.  If planning an impromptu airshow made you feel needed and important good for you.  If some LT thinks that helped him, it just shows how little that LT knows.

I wasn't an S-3 or XO in combat.  I was the commander.  AFter the previous commander was relieved.

You have done nothing to demonstrate how an airshow does anything but demonstrate impotence other than to make the guy not in the fight feel important.  I never considered that a valid criteria for a COA.  Guess I need to relook at how I evaluate how I do business.

1.  Is it tactically effective?
2.  Do the toc roaches feel important.

If you aren't developing my SA or actually helping me stay the fuck off the net.  

But, I'll give you this, you certainly highlight big army thinking perfectly.

must be why after 15 years and a trillion dollars later, we lost 2 wars and can't figure out why.

must have been lack of "show of force" fly bys.

And, to the point of available aircraft, in the absence of weapons release authority, they would be great if they could provide some surveillance.  Which AF won't do.  Lord knows I tried.

Show of force was real effective at letting pilots fly low and fast. Which, IMO is why many fly jets, (Delta and Frontier don't pay for that) so it's a big deal.

Ambushed without comma with unit?  Front line trace and a map, some TRPs will usually be plenty for some HE. Wed constantly have tubes laid on the likely enemy positions  as a bonus, you know the AF isn't going to bother flying in an area that had an artillery round used in it recently. Immediate suppression on a known point takes about 3 sec to call up in practice...

We just need faster single seat jets so they can get 20 clicks away at 30k feet faster

 

I remember seeing fast movers come down to rip across the valley in Barg-e matal. Even a very impressive low flybying French mirage with after burners

The enemy was not the least bit fazed by this display at all. No fucks given and just resumed to pour it on minutes after

Around 2:50 into the video..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd55NqhsQl4&app=desktop


1:05 here A-10 coming in

What the fuck was that at 3:03.   Seemed a lot bigger than a 84

Big bada boom.

Why force enemy heads down for 3-5 seconds with a short belt of 240 fire when you can fly a fighter jet overhead.

Thanks taxpayers

so that dumb ass senior ground commanders when they ask the question, "what the fuck are you doing here?" can be provided an answer which placates them.


so I shut down my mortars and arty for 45 minutes and you didn't do a fucking thing!

Not, so, you knuckle dragging retard!!!   We did a show of force!!!  The effect is exactly same!

I think they overestimate the effects of all types of airpower. I like big bombs too but usually they're so late a few 60mm he/process are much more effective. We keep trying bombs because they have more potential in theory.

 

If that's the case, pull back.

Arclight raid

I have the video of that french mirage still. how do I upload it to arfcom jorge?

They did a fly by with a predator drone too. gay

Also video of the 500 pounder I called in with the goofy air force JTAC that wasted dudes.


I personally never saw the benefits of the goofy fly by shit. When they dropped bombs bad guys died, that was cool.



I did enjoy directing fire with a command launch unit for the mortars. Killed people dead.

5.56x45 worked too.

The one time the French did cas for my platoon it was the fastest we ever had it. To be honest they dropped the first off target but quickly and safely then reattacked beautifully. Mirage also...


 

They called it "SERE" when I was there, but that was a long time ago.

Same same now,

Maybe you thought I was kidding, but I really meant it when I said I held your job. Yup, commanded an advisor team.  BTDT.  Feel free to get off your high horse and stop the chest thumping. I know, as do you, advisors dont own battle space, battle track, or clear US fires.

Not being in the National Guard, I did your job, advisor, then on other deployments, plural, did other jobs.  One of them was 'TOC roach.' I was probably doing that while you were back at the national guard armory racking up 60,000 posts on AR15.com. Thats what active component majors in combat arms do in a war.  Not ashamed of it.

As far as convincing you, I dont see the need as you dont have my level of experience to base it on.  For the record, when we had comms we executed call for fire. When we had degraded comms and could not establish consistent comms with the patrol, we did SoF and pushed  CAS and indirect fires.  Sometimes pushing them in an SoF posture set the conditions to clear fires when comms were fixed.  Sometimes not.

I know you would rather run your mouth then learn something, but afterword we would hold AARs with the patrol leaders and while all of us would have rather employed joint fires and shot to kill, the universal assessment from those on the ground was it did help. We were professionals doing a job and if the feedback was not to do it we would have stopped.  So I have platoon leaders who said to sustain the TTP, and you, special snowflake, telling me we were all wrong and it doesnt work.  Well, it is over anyway so I guess we didnt know how dumb we all were. Guerrillas didnt view a jet fly by as impotence, and when they heard incoming they usually broke contact. Seeing as you were just an advisor, and didnt use SoF, as  you thought its stupid, doesnt sound like you have any first hand experience to contradict that, do you?  They did break contact, and we got sustains from the people in the task force who saw it with their own two eyes.  Obviously, we would prefer to refine comms so it didnt happen.  It was a play in the playbook.   Not the primary COA.  

Seeing as this thread isnt about you or your opinion, but about a unit that was engaged where comms blackouts were a factor, I'm offering my experiences. Take it or leave it.   Frankly, I'm not talking to you anyway, as you'd rather beat your chest then learn something new anyway. Maybe someone else cares as I know you dont.

I didn't have either of your jobs. A10s doing fly bys and shooting holes in the ground is excellent morale support for bluefor. Bad guys hit the deck. Green suiters cheer. Then everybody either goes home or keeps fighting. A flyby show of force is essentially a thirty thousand dollar fake punch. Now I know, "it's already paid for might as well use it" but it seems pretty clear that overuse of a morale tool can start down the road to turning rationalization into justification.

If it was a term of phrase needed to get CAS off the ground due to political climate, that's one thing.

If it's because someone was scared and wanted airplanes to fly through ( but didn't need bombs dropped) that's a more embarrassing problem.

You didn't have my job.  I had my job.  There are a lot of different advising teams and the mission changed constantly.  It was different month to month, province to province and certainly between Iraq and Afghanistan.  

When I was first there, I tried the SoF shit sandwich because it was the only thing available.  It was worse than worthless.  Because now I am wasting my time coordinating an airshow instead of actually killing people.  

You can't say with any definitive conclusion that an air show caused them to break contact.  They usually broke contact because they hit and run.  If it was such an effective TTP, where is the history of it?  You being that regular army expert of war and all must be a scholar of guerilla warfare.  

I know it is wide spread.  I know lots of people think its just a super duper tactic and it REALLY scares the fuzzy wuzzys.  I also know everyone is convinced that flying a B-52 to S. Korea is an effective deterence to N. Korea.  

I also know the army is largely a bureaucracy filled with bureaucrats.  Again.  15 years, 1 trillion dollars and two losses and noone is questioning what went wrong.  

An airshow demonstrates nothing but impotence.  why impotency is such an effective tactic in war has yet to be demonstrated.  

your LTs thought it was cool?  You'll have to do better.

Its ultimately a facade thrown up to protect an incompetent and ineffective branch of service.

I feel like this thread is just another example of how bad of a failure TACS/AAGS is. Then stupid company men will defend it, and the way they've always done it.

"I've done C2 in the shit." C2 in Afghanistan was and very likely still is a complete clusterfuck. If we eliminated all HQ above Battalion and pushed all assets down to BN, we'd be doing better. During the surge in Afghanistan, we had thousands of TOC roaches, and they were pretty much all useless drones working 18 hours a day for nothing. I was one of them. Battalions didn't do shit except micromanage company commanders, everything above battalion micromanaged their echelon of toys.

The way we do targeting and CAS in the conventional Army/AF is a complete ineffective shitshow. The fact that it ever works is luck, inexperienced enemy, or divine intervention. Any Officer stupid enough to defend it should be stripped of their commission, drug into the street, and shot for gross incompetence.

We use the same Air to ground planning and coordination system in Afghanistan, that we planned to use to fight the Russians in the Gap. What a fucking disgrace. It's equally stupid to training on tank gunnery, division maneuver and Chemical protection prior to an Afghanistan deployment.

What's even more sad is that the special people have finally figured it out, and do air support the right way, with direct support. This direct support is assigned in a timely manner, and involved in the planning process. Pretty much the opposite of the clusterfuck that is the ATO cycle.

I hate to say it but right now that's almost exactly how it is in Afghanistan.  CAS is a very touchy thing delegated way higher than it needs to be.


I have seen a successful show of force before.  A couple years ago we got into a several hour TIC in a green zone.  Ammo and water low.  Long story short, JTAC got shot, no SOTACs, air could not drop any longer.  SBF was out of mortars and MG ammo.  Medevac would not land due to ISR showing a large enemy force still advancing through the town.  2 F-16's and 2 A-10s screaming in doing rolls and dropping flares got that maneuvering enemy force to disband and head for the karez system to hide, allowing the medevac to land and us to send up our dude, which in turn allowed us to exfil on foot.

A show of force is meant to show the enemy air is on station and close.  That's sometimes enough to make them reconsider their COA.

That briefs well.  But by not laying scunion what are you telling the enemy?  We say don't fire warning shots.  Why should we do so with air assets?  Lets cut to the chase of your vignette.  Air could not drop any longer.  Why was that?  A shitty system.  JTAC got shot so no more air support.  Brilliant fucking system.  So, having fixed the enemy, we let them get away so they can kill us some other time.

And I am sure the airshow got a few air medals thrown their way and we talked about how letting the enemy escape was, in actuality, our objective all along.

I think you have a habit of vastly oversimplifying things to meet the needs of your arguments.  The mission was extremely successful, exfil was the objective at that point.  Scraping some more kills out would be awesome, but the reality is with small elements split up all over the place without the SA of that controller on the ground that's how blue on blue happens.  Danger close drops in urban or green concealment is not something that should be done out of bravado but necessity.

Its not that it briefed well, it worked exactly for what we needed.

Are qualified JTACs and CCTs the only folks who can call in air these days? Back in the Vietnam days, it seemed if you could identify your pos on the map and where the enemy was, anybody with a radio could call the Redlegs for arty or the FACs for air.

How does it generally go down for non-SOF elements?

As an outsider looking in it seems that charlieR is not advocating a show of force as an ideal or even good option in a normal troops in contact SOP.

If there are no communications with the troops and therefore no one up the chain of command knows exactly where the good guys are or where the bad guys are then smoke, illumination rounds or high speed passes would be better than nothing.

The Red Wings saga was about a a comms cluster where nobody knew where the SEALs were, where the bad guys were or much of what was going on.

I assume you are not advocating dropping JDAMs in that situation?

I was taught as a 11 bang bang to call for fire but never called anything in but a medvac.

He probably posted only having read part of the first page of the thread.

TACP, CCT, SOTAC or JFOs with active JTAC qualifications and callsigns are pretty much the only people that have drop authority when troops are on the ground.  It's a pretty big deal, I cant tell you how many times in the past 8 months alone that "maneuvering enemy force" the jets or ISR called up was in fact....us.    Add in 60-80 non-English speaking partner force and things get real awesome, real fast with regards to battlefield SA.

Ive heard a more conventional conflict isn't as hard to deconflict as an established FLOT is more likely to be in place.

And I would argue killing the enemy is always the objective.

the hard part in nearly all counter insurgencies (and any guerilla conflict) is finding the enemy.  Once found, the superior force (in theory us) should never miss an opportunity to kill them.  

The Blue on Blue happens more often with AF assets dependent upon ground controllers than with army assets with no requirement for a terminal controller.  So I don't accept that.

Its not bravado to kill the enemy.  Its merely combat.

I am not.

I am not foolish enough, either, to pretend an airshow was going to do anything useful.

sometimes you are straight up fucked.

But a highly flexible and decentralized lethal element with fantastic mobility can mitigate severe fuck ups.

Its a shame we don't have it.

I have often heard the problem isn't our doctrine, but rather the wars we fight.  We just need better wars.  The fantasy one in China looks perfect.

What if each infantry  company had a couple ov 10 broncos and a1skyraiders they could use at their whim.  As part if their own org.

I'd like to see the budget for organizational change alone.
War is politics by other means.




But nevermind all that: We're Americans. We don't think; we DO!

revolutionary.

In 1959...

A 1959 study recommend 36 aircraft per division STOL, max armament of 3000-5000 pounds, 200-300 cruise, loiter on station for 3 hours and night time capable.
But we will never fight a guerilla war again, I'm sure.  Thread hijack complete.  I really don't care, truth be told.  We will keep losing wars and spending money because dod exists to spend money, not win wars.

Once I came to this realization my life became much simpler.

Not to spin too far off topic here, but..

How many of us have sat around for over an hour after the fight is over because the Lt is "gonna drop a bomb"....

once that workup starts, there is no more artillery or mortars in the air and the bad dudes would more often than not skate.


I agree with Sylvan in the sense that at the end of the day its about killing the other guy. Once he's dead he will never again be a problem. That is the whole point right? Oversimplified as it may be, I think one of the problems we have is turning war into this extremely tedious and complicated process. Holy shit, the dudes we are fighting on the ground in afghan wake up, slide into flip flops and roll out with a PKM, some ammo and a killer mindset. Do we really need the Battalion TOC to micro manage killing a guy like that?

While show of force and morale boosters like a screaming jet coming down the valley is cool as shit, it kills nobody and often results in a pause in all of our killing efforts. If anything I would say that the lull before the fly by as its being worked up results in the enemy force either maneuvering on us or gives them the chance to utilize those getaway sticks and bail.

25 dudes on the ground, 9 hours in, mission objectives met, no water, little ammo, no JTAC, 8500' in elevation with one casualty....a GFC that went chasing rabbits through IED alleys at that point probably wouldn't be one for much longer.  Everyone around him would ensure that, if he wasn't handed a relief for cause already.

At some point the risk is not worth the reward, with the risk being our lives.  We can exfil and go hit a dozen more COIs next month for quantifiable effects, or we can chase down anything and everything even when compromised and possibly lose people in the process.  

What you seem to be insisting on is bravado, plain and simple.

Well, we are going to spend 20 years in AFghanistan with the taliban in control of the country.  

so I guess those quantifiable effects are all that matters.

Chasing rabbits?  All I am asking for is actually killing an enemy that is fixed in place with assets that are invulnerable to the enemy.

But when you spend 1 million dollars to sortie a B-1 that drops nothing, you gotta brief something other than, "well, we just couldn't do anything."

It makes sense not to take any risks when you know you are going to lose the war anyway.  The bigger question is why you are rolling out of the wire at all?

We take a massive amount of risks here, please don't insinuate otherwise, even though the anecdote in question is several years old.  But there is a point where risk versus reward is not worth it.  This is especially important nowadays.

Getting people killed because you want to drop in the blind or send squads through uncleared alleys for a mediocre payoff at best is most certainly not how you will win anything.

As usual, you are missing the point attempting to pick apart an individual situation which you don't really understand, and pretty much downright insulting me by twisting the term unnecessary risk into an insinuation of taking no risks at all.

I realize that conventional maneuver officers only generally get maybe one deployment on the ground, and out of that only a handful of instances to really "get at 'em", which you guys will have to feed on for the rest of your lives.  But the reality is that it really isn't worth it to take unnecessary risks and endanger peoples lives for very little reason.  The guys on that mission were some real meat eaters, and if they can find it in their hearts to move along, it was probably for the best.  FWIW, we destroyed several hundred pounds of enemy munitions prior to the casualty and exfil, so your further insinuations that there was no payoff by allowing a handful of squirters to make it is also unfounded.





Better to brief that versus briefing why you dropped on your own element.

Our FOs would talk to the planes and give them grids to hit all the time (just regular 13F), would would the LTs.  A PFC with a basic understanding about how to read a map (bonus if he knows how to use compass and protractor) should be able to do it.  I did see an op where we had actual AF guys to do the plane stuff, that happened all of once and they were total dicks, inexperienced dicks at that in this particular case.



 

And I agree.

Which is why I wish we would brief THAT instead of lying about "Shows of Force" being actually effective.

You are mis representing what I am saying.  

The show of force as an effective tactic in any kind of warfare is an abject lie to hide the failure specifically of the JTAGS in its various manifestations particularly in the small war environment.

You are quite openly stating I am careless in the way in which I would command my forces whereas my actual record in that area would show a remarkable success rate in both killing the enemy and being judicious in assuming risk.

everything you have stated has reinforced my greater point.  Namely, we say show of force when we should be saying "we failed to do anything useful"

Now, whether this lie is a useful lie could be debated.  But what cannot be debated is it is a terrible idea to hide a terrible and failed system.

Not that anyone cares anyway.

we all know we are going to leave and the taliban are going to move right back in where they were when we left.  Its just a question of how long it will take.

Maybe we will do a final fly by with a barrel role with F35s and B21s to show the taliban we might bomb them at a later date.

While I am not defending a show of force in any way, I have provided an anecdote where it was truly effective.  Experience has also shown me that a local checkpoint with a jet or apache hanging out over it will not get attacked.  They literally wait until the air moves off station.  That can be considered a show of force in the most literal sense.

We got hit with an IED mobility kill a few weeks ago in a pretty bad spot.  All the bad guys wanted some during the recovery until the birds showed up.  Then nobody wanted to party.  We slugged it out a bit on our own beforehand, but the birds never had to fire a shot.


In the context of the OP, had they immediately flooded that air with air assets drop or not the enemy would have suffered a catastrophic will to fight.  It's a fact.  They aren't always stupid.

Your frame of reference is from studying very small units that were not often near friendlies when out on their missions, which is appropriate for this thread.

In SEA, there were LRRPs, Project Teams, SF, and other small recon units who were very adept at maintaining comms and often had a face-to-face relationship with the air crews they worked with out of the same compound (dedicated air assets in some cases).

With the more secretive units, the pilots were foreign mercenaries trained by the US, so there was a paternal/brotherly dynamic even deeper than you see on the conventional side because the parent unit trained its own support personnel in theater.

You also had the big Army SNAFU of larger units with TIC, who had to coordinate through multiple layers of the chain of command to get CAS on station, with all the resultant deconflicting of airspace, including cease fire for mortars and holding pattern for rotary wing support.

The job of an Air Liaison Officer and his staff can be pretty complex for both the SOF side (don't confuse with SoF) and conventional side, but is generally better in SOF because you have smaller elements that are easier to control, with higher levels of training and experience dealing with chaos and still being able to take it to the enemy.

Whether it was a LRRP Team, SF Recon Team, SOG Recon or Hatchet Team, or even an A-Detachment in their camp with indigs, you had one significant thing in common:

* High degrees of training and experience in patrolling and radio communications across all team members, to an extent that you just don't see in conventional units

In the case of Red Wings and Murphy's 4-man team, they had one trained guy who is seen as "the comms guy", and no indications of emphasis on cross-training, and definitely no redundant systems to be able to communicate.  I do see pictures of them with what appear to be MBTRs or some kind of Team internal radios. SEALs love Team Internal comms, because that's what they've seen in Hollywood.  TM Internal is easy.  Everyone gets on the freq prior to departure, uses it within LOS of each other in close proximity during mission, no big deal.  Team External comms is a different ballgame, but more critical.  Cross-training on comms helps everyone understand how difficult and important it is.

In every Recon unit I was in, you started from the ground-up, which meant you were either RTO or Assistant RTO in LRS.  I had already been RTO in the line in my first Infantry Rifle Platoon, and knew my job as an RTO there well.  It is a heck of a lot more than just carrying a radio and talking to higher, but being an RTO in the line is a lot easier than in even a Battalion-level Scout Platoon.

In a small Recon Team, you don't have 42 swinging richards with machine guns, assault rifles, anti-armor weapons, and a bad attitude surrounding you.  It's just you and a few other dudes with your stuff in the wind.  You can't run over to one of the other Platoon RTOs for help like you often can in the line if some of your gear is kaput (bad handmike, antennae, need a fill with the ANCD, etc.)    

In LRS, SF, and any unit that goes way outside of friendly lines, you have a lot of different radio systems including SAT, HF, VHF/UHF, and other things so that there is a back-up for the back-up (PACE), and parallel systems to communicate with USAF/USN aircraft as well.  Everyone is trained on them, memorizes freqs, with commo plan and no-commo plan being a huge focal point of mission planning-to the extent that detailed terrain analysis factors into the LOS and HF communications systems. We would take HF, SATCOM PSC-5, SINGARS R/T, UHF/VHF, in addition to TM Internal.

Murphy's team had none of that.  This meant that there was no ground unit in contact with comms when the QRF arrived, so the guys at JSOTF in Jalalabad assumed the worst about the air threat once the QRF was blown out of the sky:  that MANPADS could have been in play.  This had huge repercussions for the recovery effort, effectively preventing the gunships from coming in and slaying those turd fingers with FLIR/30mm chain gun.

Once they were hit in their hasty hide site with overwhelming fire from PKMs, RPGs, and AKs raining down from above, their Situational Awareness and ability to shoot, move, and actively communicate was gone.  I won't say more than that about this aspect, because it's been covered.

The fact that there were only 4 of them and they had no real successful approach to stealth from the get-go is largely what killed them.

No stealth for infil - the bugger lickers heard them clear as thunder come in so close with the MH-47.  You don't need a GED to understand that someone just flew a Chinook into your hood.

No stealth post-infil.  The ropes were dropped and not pulled into the bird, which makes no sense to me.  After that, they weren't buried or camouflaged, not that it mattered, because dudes were headed to where they thought they heard the infil anyway.

Their trail was easy to track.  Luttrell said during the live Patriot Tour that during infil, they were falling down and laughing alongside the mountain as they slid in mud when one of them took a spill, and they didn't even have rucks. They had 3-day assault packs with minimal kit.  I have personally humped mission rucks weighing 85lb and up in the mountains with my Team, and nobody took a spill, even at night.  We had close calls, where a guy almost walked off a cliff wearing -14s, so I'm not saying it's easy, but with assault packs there should be no problems like that.

They were doomed before even leaving the wire for the reasons already spelled out.  Lack of logical planning, not enough guys for this mission, no standard recon mission commo plan, no redundant comms, insert too close to the objective, no stealth, no good positioning of the surveillance site, fish in a bucket.  It's actually kinda hard to think of worse things they could have done.  Oh yeah, the hardened military laptop with detailed plans of the US Embassy and other painfully-sensitive contents was icing on the cake for enemies of the US that Ahmad Shah doesn't even comprehend.

JFIREs qualified fisters maybe, but a random PFC isn't getting on the radio and giving drop authority.  You can give all the grids you want but no plane is going to drop and take responsibility for CIVCAS or blue on blue based off of some random callsign.

The first statement on the radio when talking to birds as a non JTAC is to tell them you are not JTAC qualified.  At that point you had better ID yourself as the GFC or they will stop listening.  There's a pretty big chance they still wont do shit you say even then.

the only exception I can think of would be pre-approved TRPs.

Only if the threat of a drop exists.

And specific to this example.  Even had comms not failed and they were able to bring air in, it was effectively over before even the quickest fast mover could have showed up.  

I am referring to the show of force where the jet comes down at low level very quickly, does nothing, every body yells "Fuck Yeah!" and nothing happens.

An apache or kiowa hovering over head is not simply a "show of force"  Its a killing platform looking for a target.  Because it can identify and destroy targets without the need for a JTAC.  

I would say there is a huge difference between an apached at 2K AGL doing orbits and a F16 and either 15K AGL or 1K AGL doing orbits and I think the taliban, after 15 years of incompetence on our part, know the difference, too.