AFGHANISTAN AND THE FUTURE

OF WARFARE: IMPLICATIONS FOR ARMY

AND DEFENSE POLICY

Stephen Biddle

November 2002
*****

The author would like to thank the many individuals whose comments

on previous drafts or briefings have improved the final monograph, and

particularly Dr. Conrad Crane, Colonel Michael Hiemstra, Professor

Douglas Lovelace, Colonel Douglas MacGregor, Colonel John R. Martin,

Mr. Timothy Muchmore, and Dr. Kalev Sepp. The author would also like

to thank Dr. Dale Andrade, Colonel Al Aycock, Dr. Chuck Briscoe,

Brigadier General John S. Brown, Major Mack Brown, Colonel John R.

Martin, Mr. Timothy Muchmore, Major John Warsinske, and Mr.

Anthony Williams for their invaluable assistance in gaining access to

key people, places, and information. Finally, the author would like to

thank the forty-six soldiers, airmen, and analysts whose interviews

form the basis of the analysis presented here, and without whose

generous contributions of time and cooperation this analysis would not

have been possible. Any errors of fact or interpretation, of course, are the

responsibility of the author.

*****

The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not

necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the

Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This report

is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.

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(717) 245-3820, or via the Internet at Rita.Rummel@carlisle.army.mil

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ISBN 1-58487-107-5

iii
FOREWORD

America’s novel use of special operations forces,

precision weapons, and indigenous allies has attracted

widespread attention since its debut in Northern

Afghanistan last fall. It has proven both influential and

controversial. Many think it caused the Taliban’s sudden

collapse. For them, this “Afghan Model” represents

warfare’s future and should become the new template for

U.S. defense planning. Critics, however, see Afghanistan as

an anomaly—a non-repeatable product of local conditions.

This monograph examines the Afghan Model’s actual role in

the fall of the Taliban, using evidence collected from a

combination of 46 participant interviews, terrain inspection

in Afghanistan, and written documentation from both

official and unofficial sources.

The author, Dr. Stephen Biddle, argues that neither of

the main current interpretations is sound: Afghanistan

offers important clues to warfare’s future, but not the ones

most people think. The campaign of 2001-02 was a

surprisingly orthodox air-ground theater campaign in

which heavy fire support decided a contest between two

land armies. Of course, some elements were quite new.

Precision firepower was available in unprecedented

quantity and proved crucial for success; special operations

forces served as the main effort in a theater of war. In an

important sense, though, the differences were less salient

than the continuities: the key to success in both Afghanistan

and traditional joint warfare was the close interaction of fire

and maneuver—neither of which was sufficient alone, and

neither of which could succeed without sizeable ground

forces trained and equipped at least as well as their

opponents. In Afghanistan, our allies provided these ground

forces for us; where others can do so, the Afghan Model can

be expected to prevail. Hence Afghanistan is not unique.

But not all future allies have armies trained and equipped

iv
to their enemies’ standards. Without this, neither the

bravery of our special operations forces nor the

sophistication of our precision guided munitions (PGMs)

can ensure an Afghan-like collapse in a resolute

opponent—and this implies a very different set of policies

for the armed forces and the Nation than many of those now

prominent in the public debate on the war.

The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to offer this

monograph as a contribution to the national security debate

on this important subject.

DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.

Director

Strategic Studies Institute

v
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

STEPHEN D. BIDDLE is Associate Research Professor of

National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College

Strategic Studies Institute (SSI). Before joining SSI in June

2001, he was a member of the political science faculty at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held

research positions at the Institute for Defense Analyses

(IDA) in Alexandria, Virginia; the Harvard University

Center for Science and International Affairs (CSIA); and the

Kennedy School of Government’s Office of National Security

Programs. Dr. Biddle has presented testimony before

congressional committees on matters of conventional net

assessment and arms control, served as U.S.

Representative to the NATO Defense Research Group study

on Stable Defense, and is co-director of the Columbia

University Summer Workshop on the Analysis of Military

Operations and Strategy (SWAMOS). His research has won

Barchi, Rist, and Impact Prizes from the Military

Operations Research Society; most recently, his paper, “The

Interaction of Skill and Technology in Combat” (with

Michael Fischerkeller and Wade Hinkle), won the Society’s

2000 Rist Prize. His publications include articles in

International Security, Survival, Security Studies, The

Journal of Strategic Studies, The Journal of Politics,

Contemporary Security Policy, Defense Analysis, and

Military Operations Research; shorter pieces on military

topics in Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, Orbis,

Defense News, and Joint Force Quarterly; various chapters

in edited volumes; and 24 IDA and NATO reports. He holds

AB (1981), MPP (1985), and Ph.D. (Public Policy, 1992)

degrees, all from Harvard University.

vi
SUMMARY

The defense debate tends to treat Afghanistan as either

a revolution or a fluke: either the “Afghan Model” of special

operations forces (SOF) plus precision munitions plus an

indigenous ally is a widely applicable template for

American defense planning, or it is a nonreplicable product

of local idiosyncrasies. In fact, it is neither. The Afghan

campaign of last fall and winter was actually much closer to

a typical 20th century mid-intensity conflict, albeit one with

unusually heavy fire support for one side. And this view has

very different implications than either proponents or

skeptics of the Afghan Model now claim.

Afghan Model skeptics often point to Afghanistan’s

unusual culture of defection or the Taliban’s poor skill or

motivation as grounds for doubting the war’s relevance to

the future. Afghanistan’s culture is certainly unusual, and

there were many defections. The great bulk, however,

occurred after the military tide had turned—not beforehand. They were effects, not causes. The Afghan Taliban

were surely unskilled and ill-motivated. The non-Afghan al

Qaeda, however, have proven resolute and capable fighters.

Their host’s collapse was not attributable to any al Qaeda

shortage of commitment or training.

Afghan Model proponents, by contrast, credit precision

weapons with annihilating enemies at a distance before

they could close with our commandos or indigenous allies.

Hence the model’s broad utility: with SOF-directed bombs

doing the real killing, even ragtag local militias will suffice

as allies. All they need do is screen U.S. commandos from

the occasional hostile survivor and occupy the abandoned

ground thereafter. Yet the actual fighting in Afghanistan

involved substantial close combat. Al Qaeda

counterattackers closed, unseen, to pointblank range of

friendly forces in battles at Highway 4 and Sayed Slim

Kalay. Al Qaeda defenders eluded detection or destruction

vii
by American air attack and had to be overrun at Bai Beche,

Highway 4, and Operation ANACONDA. At Tora Bora,

failure to commit properly trained and motivated ground

troops to traditional close combat probably allowed the al

Qaeda quarry to escape.

None of this means that precision weapons or special

operations forces are not tremendously valuable. Few 20th

century combatants enjoyed anything like the power or

efficiency of U.S. high-tech fire support in Afghanistan. But

just as weeks of bombardment failed to kill the entirety of

1916’s trench garrisons, so 2001’s precision-guided fire

support killed many but not all of its al Qaeda opponents.

And even a handful of hostile survivors armed with modern

automatic weapons can be lethal to unskilled militia allies,

just as they were to poorly trained draftees in 1916.

The key to success, whether in 1916 or 2002, is to team

heavy, well-directed fires with skilled ground maneuver to

exploit their effects and overwhelm the surviving enemy.

This kind of skilled maneuver, however, is beyond the reach

of many potential indigenous allies. In Afghanistan, U.S.

proxies with American air support brushed aside unskilled,

ill-motivated Afghan Taliban, but against hard-core al

Qaeda opposition, outcomes were often in doubt even with

the benefit of 21st century U.S. air power and American

commandos to direct it. Where we face opponents with the

gumption and training to stand and fight, our allies need the

same, even with all the modern firepower we can offer them.

This in turn implies that we should neither restructure

the military to wage Afghan-style wars more efficiently, nor

reflexively commit conventional U.S. ground forces in every

conflict. Where we enjoy local allies with the needed skills

and motivation, we can expect the Afghan Model to work,

and we should use it. But we will not always be so lucky. In

Iraq, for example, the lack of a credible, trained opposition

bodes ill for an Afghanistan-style campaign without major

American ground forces. Deep cuts in ground capability

could thus be very risky in spite of our strengths in air power

viii
or special operations forces. More broadly, though, we

should be wary of suggestions that precision weapons, with

or without special operations forces to direct them, have so

revolutionized warfare that traditional ground forces are

now superceded. Where our allies are good enough, they

may provide the ground troops for us, but what Afghanistan

really shows is that the wars of tomorrow—like those of

yesterday—will continue to require skilled, motivated

forces on the ground, in strength, if we are to exploit our

technology’s effects. Precision weapons are making that

ground-air combination ever more capable, but against

resolute opponents, neither air power nor conventional

ground forces will be able to prevail without the other any

time soon.

ix
AFGHANISTAN AND THE FUTURE

OF WARFARE: IMPLICATIONS FOR ARMY

AND DEFENSE POLICY

Wartime experience always shapes the postwar policy

debate, and the campaign in Afghanistan has had an

unusually prompt effect. The global war on terrorism is

barely joined. Sporadic fighting is still ongoing in

Afghanistan itself. Yet the apparent success of American

arms there last fall and winter is already playing a major

role in a series of debates over the future of the American

military, the conduct of the continuing war, and even the

shape of American foreign policy as a whole.

In particular, many now argue that in 2001-02, a novel

combination of special operations forces (SOF),

precision-guided munitions (PGMs), and an indigenous ally

destroyed the Taliban’s military, toppled their regime, and

did so while neither exposing Americans to the risk of heavy

casualties nor expanding the American presence in a way

that might spur nationalist insurgency. In this new “Afghan

Model” it is argued, small teams of elite commandos on the

ground provided the targeting information needed for

precision weapons to reach dispersed, concealed opponents.

Until the commandos arrived, high-altitude bombing could

do little against a country with few large, fixed targets. But

once coalition bombing was guided by friendly eyes on the

ground, many claim, it became possible for airpower to

annihilate the Taliban infantry and armor that had stymied

the Northern Alliance for the preceding 6 years of civil

warfare, enabling even an unsophisticated, outnumbered

ally to liberate the entire country in a matter of weeks.1

1

1 See, e.g., Michael Gordon, “‘New’ U.S. War: Commandos, Airstrikes and Allies on

the Ground,” New York Times, December 29, 2001, p. 1; Paul Watson and Richard

Cooper, “Blended Tactics Paved Way for Sudden Collapse,” Los Angeles Times,

November 15, 2001; Thom Shanker, “Conduct of War is Redefined by Success of

Special Forces,” New York Times, January 21, 2002, p. 1; Vernon Loeb, “An

Unlikely Super-Warrior Emerges in Afghan War,” Washington Post, May 19, 2002,

p. 16; John Hendren, “Afghanistan Yields Lessons for Pentagon’s Next Targets,”
Many now believe that this Afghan Model could be used

elsewhere with comparable effect. It has been widely

reported that senior civilian Defense officials advocate its

use against Iraq.2 Many see it more broadly still—as a new

“American way of war” applicable across a wide range of

future conflict types. After all, almost any likely opponent

has local enemies who could serve as indigenous allies,

either domestically or in neighboring states threatened by

our enemies’ ambitions—and we can employ special forces

and precision weaponry almost anywhere. If this

combination works elsewhere with anything like its

effectiveness in Afghanistan, then it might enable us to win

the wars of the future with minimal U.S. casualty exposure

and political footprint.3

2

Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2002, p. 1; Rajiv Chandrasekaran and John

Pomfret, “Aided by U.S., Pashtun Militias Move Closer to Kandahar,” Washington

Post, November 27, 2001, p. 6; Ann Scott Tyson, “U.S. is Prevailing With Its Most

Finely Tuned War,” Christian Science Monitor, November 21, 2001, p. 1; Joseph

Fitchett, “Swift Success for High-Tech Arms,” International Herald Tribune,

December 7, 2001, p. 1; “Afghanistan: First Lessons,” Jane’s Defence Weekly,

December 19, 2001.

2 See, e.g., Thomas Ricks, “Military Sees Iraq Invasion Put on Hold,” Washington

Post, May 24, 2002, p. 1; Michael Gordon, “Iraqis Seek to Oust Hussein with U.S.

Military Training,” New York Times, January 31, 2002, p. A10; Dave Moniz,

“Afghanistan’s Lessons Shaping New Military,” USA Today, October 8, 2002, p. 13;

Michael Dobbs, “Old Strategy on Iraq Sparks New Debate: Backers Say Plan

Proven in Afghanistan,” Washington Post, December 27, 2001, p. A1; Rowan

Scarborough, “Pentagon Uses Afghan War as Model for Iraq,” Washington Times,

December 4, 2001, p. 1; idem, “White House Will Deal With Iraq,” Washington

Times, December 20, 2001; idem, “Size of Force on Ground Key in Plan for Iraq

War,” Washington Times, April 26, 2002, p. 1; Seymour Hersh, “The Iraq Hawks:

Can Their Plan Work?” The New Yorker, December 24, 2001; “Afghanistan: First

Lessons,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, December 19, 2001; Lawrence Kaplan, “Phase

Two: Why the Bush Administration Will Go After Iraq,” The New Republic,

December 10, 2001.

3 Prominent proponents of such views have included, inter alia, Richard Perle, R.

James Woolsey, Stansfield Turner, Michael Vickers, Thomas Donnelly, Daniel

Goure, Fareed Zakaria, and James Webb: see, e.g., Ronald Brownstein, “Hawks

Urge Bush to Extend Military Campaign to Iraq,” Los Angeles Times, November

20, 2001; Bill Gertz, “Rumsfeld Advisor Says Widen the War to Include Saddam;

Favors Airstrikes, Use of Local Forces,” Washington Times, February 28, 2002, p.

A12; R. James Woolsey, “Objective: Democracy,” Washington Post, November 27,

2001, p. 13; Brad Knickerbocker, “War May Prod Military Reforms,” Christian

Science Monitor, January 3, 2002, p. 1; Tom Bowman, “Studying Lessons of Battle

Success,” Baltimore Sun, December 17, 2001; “Location, Location, Location,”

Jane’s Defence Weekly, February 27, 2002; Fareed Zakaria, “Face the Facts:

Bombing Works,” Newsweek, December 3, 2001; James Webb, “A New Doctrine for

New Wars,” Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2001; also Arnaud de Borchgrave,

“Uniting Mission and Coalition,” Washington Times, February 22, 2002, who notes

the broad support for such views among conservative intellectuals; Ken Adelman,
If so, the policy implications could be sweeping. It might,

for example, make sense to restructure the U.S. military

around the requirements of this new way of war, with larger

special operations forces, modernized, longer-range aircraft

and missiles, deep reductions in conventional Army and

Marine Corps ground forces, major reallocations of Service

roles and missions, and sweeping changes in joint military

doctrine.4 Modernization programs for systems originally

designed to wage large-scale theater warfare, such as the

F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter, the Comanche armed

reconnaissance helicopter, or the V22 tilt rotor transport

aircraft could all be challenged as backward-looking

failures to reflect the new possibilities.5 The case for

expanding the ongoing war on terrorism to topple regimes

in Iraq or elsewhere would be strengthened if the Afghan

Model were seen as a cheap, effective way to leverage local

allies in pursuit of American aims.6 Most broadly, a

powerful, widely-applicable means of waging war at global

3

“Taking Exception: Cakewalk in Iraq,” Washington Post, February 13, 2002, p. 27;

James Phillips, “Keys to the Endgame in Afghanistan,” Heritage Foundation

Backgrounder No. 1507, December 6, 2001, p. 12; Michael Kelly, “The Air-Power

Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly, April 2002, pp. 18ff. Such views are not limited to

outside analysts. Robert Andrews, Principal Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of

Defense, Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict, recently suggested that the

combination of special forces and precision munitions in Afghanistan had “changed

the face of war.” Linda Kozaryn, “U.S. Special Operations Forces Change ‘Face of

War,’” American Forces Press Service, December 14, 2001. Many senior civilian

defense officials are reported to believe that the Afghanistan experience validates a

prior expectation that warfare has been revolutionized: see, e.g., Rowan

Scarborough, “Army Officials Fear More Cuts,” Washington Times, June 4, 2002, p.

6. President Bush himself characterized Afghanistan as “a proving ground .... The

conflict in Afghanistan has taught us more about the future of our military than a

decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums.” White House Press

Release, December 11, 2001, “President Speaks on War Effort to Citadel Cadets:

Remarks by the President at the Citadel, Charleston, South Carolina,” p. 3.

4 On the force structure and policy implications of the “Afghan Model,” see, e.g.,

Hunter Keeter, “Anti-Terror Campaign Could Speed Military Transformation,”

Defense Daily, November 21, 2001, p. 4; Michael Vickers, The 2001 Quadrennial

Defense Review, the FY 2003 Defense Budget Request and the Way Ahead for

Transformation: Meeting the “Rumsfeld Test”, Washington, DC: Center for

Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, June 19, 2002; Moniz, “Afghanistan’s Lessons

Shaping New Military;” Scarborough, “Army Officials Fear More Cuts;”

“Misdirected Defense Dollars,” New York Times, January 16, 2002; Joseph

Fitchett, “Campaign Proves the Length of U.S. Military Arm,” International

Herald Tribune, November 19, 2001, p. 1.

5 On the F-22, for example, see “Misdirected Defense Dollars,” (unsigned editorial)

New York Times, January 16, 2002.

6 See references in notes 2 and 3 above.
distances with minor risks would add major impetus to

proposals for neo-imperialist conceptions of American

foreign policy, in which unilateral U.S. military might

underwrites a Pax Americana and advances American

values and interests around the world.7

Others disagree. Many argue that the Afghan Model’s

success in 2001-02 was idiosyncratic—a product of unique

local circumstances unlikely to recur in future conflicts.8

Any real world outcome is a product of many contributing

causes, some of which are replicable and others not; critics

see nonreplicable features of the Afghan theater or the

Taliban opponent as necessary preconditions for the

outcome observed there. As Secretary of Defense Donald

Rumsfeld put it:

It is hard for me to imagine another Afghanistan. If you think

about that situation, it is kind of distinctive. Now it doesn’t

mean that some of the things that are working there won’t work

elsewhere, but the totality of it is distinctive. I don’t think we’re

going to run around with a cookie mold and repeat this.9

A related critique rests on the politico-military

disadvantages of relying so heavily on local proxies who may

not share our aims. Many such analysts point to the fighting

at Tora Bora, where Afghan allies with different interests

than ours apparently failed to press the attack and may

4

7 For the neo-imperialist brief, see, e.g., Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,”

Weekly Standard, October 15, 2001, Vol. 7, No. 5; Robert Kagan, ”The Benevolent

Empire,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1998; Sebastian Mallaby, “The Reluctant

Imperialist: Terrorism, Failed States, and the Case for American Empire,” Foreign

Affairs, March-April 2002; Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness, Why Europe and

the U.S. See the World Differently,” Policy Review, June-July 2002, no 113.

8 Prominent proponents of such views have included, inter alia, Colin Powell,

Donald Rumsfeld, Anthony Zinni, Arthur Cebrowski, Wesley Clark, Loren

Thompson, and Andrew Krepinevich. See, e.g., Alan Sipress and Peter Slevin,

“Powell Wary of Iraq Move,” Washington Post, December 21, 2001, p. 1; Donald

Rumsfeld, “Transforming the Military,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 3, May/June

2002, pp. 20-32 at 22; Tony Capaccio, “Afghan Lessons Don’t Apply to ‘Axis,’

Generals Say,” Bloomberg.com, February 20, 2002; Dobbs, “Old Strategy on Iraq

Sparks New Debate;” Kim Burger and Andrew Koch, “Afghanistan: The Key

Lessons,” Jane’s Defence Weekly, January 2, 2002; Bowman, “Studying Lessons of

Battle Success.”

9 Quoted in Rowan Scarborough, “Air Force Resists More Bombers, Prefers

Fighters,” Washington Times, December 26, 2001, p. 1.
have allowed Osama bin Laden to escape. To secure U.S.

interests, they argue, will often require that U.S., not

foreign, troops do the heavy lifting.10

If so—if Afghanistan was unique or if reliance on proxies

is politically unsound—then the policy implications are very

different than those seen by Afghan Model proponents. In

particular, the case for expanding the war to Iraq is

weakened (as this could require major U.S. ground forces

rather than the Afghan Model’s small commando teams),

the rationale for a sweeping redesign of the U.S. military

loses its most trenchant empirical support, and the military

demands of a neo-imperialist foreign policy become much

more burdensome.

To date, however, this debate has been conducted on the

basis of only the most preliminary impressions of the war’s

actual conduct. The purpose of this monograph is thus to

provide a more extensive body of evidence on the way the

Model’s elements were actually employed in Afghanistan,

the nature and behavior of its targets, and the

circumstances of the fighting—and to use this evidence to

assess the Model’s role in the Taliban’s collapse on a more

systematic basis.

The results suggest that none of the main current views

offer a sound account of the war’s actual conduct. The

Afghan Model did not, in fact, work as its proponents now

suggest; nor was its success due chiefly to unique properties

of Afghanistan or the Taliban.

To account for what is now known thus requires a

different explanation of the campaign’s outcome—one

resting neither on precision firepower per se nor on Afghan

idiosyncrasies.11 I argue below that the best explanation is

that the Afghan campaign was actually far less different or

5

10 See, e.g., Michael O’Hanlon, “A Flawed Masterpiece,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No.

3, May/June 2002, pp. 47-63; Barton Gellman and Thomas Ricks, “U.S. Concludes

Bin Laden Escaped at Tora Bora Fight; Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed

Major Error,” Washington Post, April 17, 2002, p. 1; Susan Glasser, “The Battle of

Tora Bora: Secrets, Money, Mistrust,” Washington Post, February 10, 2002, p. 1;

William Arkin, “Dropping 15,000 Pounds of Frustration,” Los Angeles Times,

December 15, 2001.
unusual than most now suppose: it was a surprisingly

orthodox air-ground theater campaign in which heavy fire

support decided a contest between two land forces. Of

course, some elements were quite new: the fire support

came almost exclusively from the air; the air strikes were

directed mostly by commandos whose methods, equipment,

and centrality to the outcome were unprecedented; and the

ground armies were mostly not countrymen of the

commandos and air forces who provided the firepower.12 In

an important sense, though, the differences were less

salient than the continuities: the key to success in

Afghanistan as in traditional joint warfare was the close

interaction of fire and maneuver, neither of which was

sufficient alone and neither of which could succeed without

significant ground forces trained and equipped at least as

well as their opponents. In Afghanistan, our allies provided

these ground forces; where others can do so, the Afghan

Model can be expected to prevail. Hence Afghanistan is not

unique. But not all future allies have armies trained and

equipped to their enemies’ standards. Without this, neither

the bravery of our special operations forces nor the

sophistication of our PGMs can ensure a quick Afghan-like

collapse of a resolute opponent.

This in turn implies that we should neither restructure

our military to wage Afghan-style wars more efficiently, nor

reflexively commit conventional U.S. ground forces in every

conflict. Where our allies’ ground forces are good enough,

the Afghan Model will work, and we should use it. But we

will not always be so lucky. In Iraq, for example, the lack of a

6

11 More precisely, the outcome I seek to explain is two-fold: 1) the Taliban’s loss of

military control over Afghanistan and their consequent fall from political power;

and, 2) our ability to bring this about without major U.S. ground forces. Note that I

do not necessarily assume that the Taliban or al Qaeda have been defeated in any

final way, or that larger U.S. interests have (or have not) been secured. For now,

these remain open questions, not empirical facts to be explained. By contrast, the

outcomes enumerated above are now observed empirical events susceptible to

explanation, and for which particular candidate explanations have become quite

influential in the policy debate. My focus below is thus on the relative utility of the

two major candidates (one focusing on replicable features of the Afghan Model, the

other focusing on idiosyncratic properties of Afghanistan or the Taliban) as

explanations of this two-fold outcome.

12 The latter, while not unprecedented (see below) was at least unusual.
credible, trained opposition bodes ill for an Afghan-style

campaign without major American ground forces. Deep cuts

in U.S. ground capability could thus be very risky in spite of

our strengths in air power and special operations forces.

More broadly, though, we should be wary of suggestions

that precision weapons have so revolutionized warfare that

traditional ground forces or close combat are now

superceded. Where our allies are able, they may provide

most of the ground troops for us, but what Afghanistan

really shows is that the wars of tomorrow—like those of

yesterday—will require tight integration of fires and

ground maneuver at close quarters to exploit technology’s

effects. Precision weapons make this combination more

powerful, but against resolute opponents, neither air power

nor conventional ground forces alone will suffice any time

soon.

I base these findings on a new collection of primary

source evidence centered on a series of 46 interviews with

key American participants in the conflict, ranging from

Special Forces Sergeants to the Major General who

commanded CJTF Mountain during Operation

ANACONDA, and including subjects from the Special

Operations Command, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force,

and the Central Intelligence Agency.13 These interviews

were complemented with official written documentation on

the conduct of the war and direct physical inspection of the

Anaconda battlefield in Afghanistan’s Shah-i-kot valley,

together with available secondary source accounts, chiefly

from the print news media. This body of evidence cannot be

considered complete; a definitive history of the Afghan

campaign would require years of research on a much

broader range of issues. Rather, my intention here is to

7

13 These interviews are documented in a series of audiotapes deposited in the U.S.

Army Military History Institute’s archive at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania,

together with other primary source documentation obtained for this project.

Collectively, they comprise the Operation Enduring Freedom Strategic Studies

Institute Research Collection, U.S. Army Military History Institute, cited

hereafter as MHI. For reasons of security, SOF personnel are identified below by

rank and first initial only. Full identification of interviewees is available in the

cited archival material at appropriate levels of classification.
focus on one key issue—the new Model’s role in the Afghan

campaign and its implications for the future—and to muster

as much evidence as can be produced in the near term, so as

to make initial findings available sooner than a definitive

history would permit, but with a stronger foundation in the

evidence than the debate to date has offered.

I present the analysis in five steps. First I outline the key

events in the Afghan campaign. Next I assess in turn the

two main current explanations of the Taliban’s fall: first, the

school that sees the causes as local and idiosyncratic;

second, the school that situates them in replicable features

of the Afghan Model.14 I then present an alternative

explanation, and show how it accounts more successfully for

the available evidence. Finally, I discuss the resulting

implications for the Army and for defense policy more

broadly.

KEY EVENTS

The bombing campaign began the night of October 7,

2001, and focused initially on destroying the Taliban’s

limited air defense and communications infrastructure.

American and British SOF teams had been conducting

scouting missions in Afghanistan beginning at least a week

prior to the first air strikes; by October 15, teams designated

to make contact with the major Northern Alliance warlords

had been inserted and begun preparations for combined

offensive action against the Taliban.15Some of the first

major combat actions occurred in the mountains south of

Mazar-e-Sharif, as SOF teams working with Northern

Alliance Generals Abdul Rashid Dostum and Atta

Mohammed fought their way north toward Mazar up the

8

14 A third argument, that the Afghan Model is too dependent on politically unreliable

proxies, is an important critique of the Afghan Model, but not one for which much

new perspective can be provided using the evidence assembled here. I thus focus

primarily on the two contrasting schools of Afghan Model proponents, and critics

who focus on the role of local idiosyncrasies. None of the conclusions reached below

are sensitive to one’s view on the political reliability of proxy forces.

15 Andrew J. Birtle, Afghan War Chronology, Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of

Military History Information Paper, 22 March 2002, pp. 2-3.
Dar-ye Suf and Balkh river valleys. The terrain and

conditions here were extraordinary: at elevations of up to

6,400 feet, movement was restricted to winding mountain

trails in which sheer rock faces were sometimes separated

from thousand-foot drops by no more than a three-foot

width of rocky path. With no vehicles able to negotiate such

trails, commandos hauling loads of over 40 pounds of

equipment per man were given Afghan mountain ponies

with wooden saddles and told to ride along with Dostum’s

troops. Luckily, the SOF team commander assigned to

Dostum had been a high school rodeo rider in Kansas, but

none of the other Americans had ever been on a horse before.

Their knees in their chests, balancing heavy rucksacks on

their backs, they were instructed by their commander to

keep their downhill foot out of the stirrups and to lean uphill

9

Figure 1. Key Engagements.
so if the pony lost its balance they would fall onto the trail as

the pony went into the gorge. On particularly rocky

stretches the team commander ordered his men to travel

with weapons out and a round chambered to shoot

immediately any pony that bolted before it could drag its

rider to his death over the rocks.16

The first combat action in this sector came when

Dostum’s group took the village of Bishqab on October 21;

this was followed by engagements at Cobaki on October 22,

Chapchal on October 23, and Oimetan on October 25. The

key battle came when Dostum’s troops encountered hostile

forces occupying old Soviet-built defensive positions at the

hamlet of Bai Beche some 16 kilometers southeast of

Keshendeh-ye Pa’in.17 On November 5, Dostum’s cavalry

overran these defenses; shortly thereafter Atta’s forces

captured Ac’capruk on the Balkh river, and the door swung

open for a rapid advance to Mazar, which fell to Atta and

Dostum’s forces on November 10.18

The fall of Mazar unhinged the Taliban position in

northern Afghanistan. Taliban defenders near Bamiyan

resisted briefly before surrendering the city on November

11; Kabul fell without a fight on November 13. A force of

some 5,000 Taliban and al Qaeda survivors were then

encircled in the city of Konduz, where they surrendered

following a 12-day siege on November 26.19

10

16 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.

17 The November 5 offensive has sometimes been referred to as “the battle of

Keshendeh-ye Pa’in”, after the largest town in the area, or “the battle of

Keshendeh-ya Bala”, a closer, though smaller, town, six kilometers west of the

Taliban lines. Below I refer to it by reference to Bai Beche, the smallest but also

closest village to the fight and the name typically used by the SOF participants in

the MHI documentation to refer to the action. All the names above, however, refer

to the same battle. Naming conventions for historical battles are ill-defined; the

actual Waterloo battlefield, for example, is closer to the town of Braine-l’Alleud

than it is to Waterloo, but Waterloo is easier for English speakers to pronounce.

18 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032802p, CPT D. int. See also Dale

Andrade, The Battle for Mazar-e-Sharif, October-November 2001, Washington,

DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History Information Paper, March 1, 2002, pp.

2-3. Meanwhile, roadbound Taliban and al Qaeda reserves moving from the

stronghold of Sholgerah were decimated by American air interdiction as they

moved initially south to reinforce the defenses of Bai Beche and Ac’capruk, then as

they fled north toward Mazar after November 5: MHI: Memorandum for the

Record, COL J. int., July 2002; Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.
Many of the prisoners taken at Mazar were

subsequently detained at the 19th century mud fortress of

Qala-e-Gangi west of the city. On November 25, a revolt at

the prison killed one American and gave rise to a 2-day

struggle before control was reestablished on November 27.20

With the fall of Kabul and Konduz, attention shifted to

the Taliban’s stronghold of Kandahar in the south. SOF

teams in support of Hamid Karzai’s forces advanced on the

city from the north; teams in support of Gul Agha Shirzai

advanced from the south. The result was a series of battles

at Tarin Kowt and Sayed Slim Kalay north of the city on

November 18 and December 2-4, respectively, and along

Highway 4 south of Kandahar from December 2-6. On the

night of December 6, Mullah Omar and the senior Taliban

leadership fled the city and went into hiding, ending

Taliban rule in Afghanistan.21

Allied forces subsequently tracked a group of al Qaeda

survivors thought to include Osama bin Laden to a series of

redoubts in the White Mountains near Tora Bora. The

redoubts were taken in a 16-day battle ending on December

17, but many al Qaeda defenders escaped death or capture

and fled across the border into Pakistan.22

In March a second concentration of al Qaeda holdouts

was identified in the Shah-i-kot valley and surrounding

mountains east of Gardez. In Operation ANACONDA, a

combined offensive by two battalions of U.S. regular

infantry from the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain

11

19 MHI: Tape 032702a, CPT T. et al. int.; Birtle, Afghan War Chronology, pp. 6, 8;

Michael Sherry, The Course of Operation Enduring Freedom in Southern and

Eastern Afghanistan, Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History

Information Paper, March 15, 2002, p. 2; John Carland, The Campaign Against

Kandahar, Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History Information

Paper, March 4, 2002, p. 2.

20 MHI: Tape 032602p, MAJ M., MAJ K. int.; Andrade, The Battle for Mazar-e-Sharif,

p. 4.

21 MHI: Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.; Tape 032802p, MAJ C. int.; Tape 032602a, CPT

H. et al. int.; Carland, The Campaign Against Kandahar, pp. 2-5.

22 Sherry, The Course of Operation Enduring Freedom in Southern and Eastern

Afghanistan, p. 3.
divisions, supported by allied Afghan and Western troops

and special operations forces from seven nations, descended

on the al Qaeda defenders, killing many, dispersing the rest,

and bringing to a close the major combat operations in the

country as of this writing.23

EXISTING VIEWS: THE TALIBAN’S FALL AS

IDIOSYNCRATIC

Were these results the products of local idiosyncrasies?

Afghanistan is certainly an unusual place, and the Taliban

were unusual opponents.24 Several of their peculiarities

might in principle have been necessary preconditions for the

Afghan Model’s success, including:

Poor enemy morale or motivation;

Poor enemy military training and expertise;

Lack of popular support for the Taliban regime;

The ease of defection in Afghan culture;

Surprise;

Taliban dependency on fragile sources of outside

support; or,

Availability of contiguous, secure territory for

resupplying and reequipping proxy forces.

Yet on closer inspection, the evidence suggests a weaker

causal role for these idiosyncrasies than some now suppose.

12

23 Sherry, The Course of Operation Enduring Freedom in Southern and Eastern

Afghanistan, p. 4.

24 In fact, prior to 9-11, members of the Army’s experimental test pilot community

routinely used Afghanistan as an illustrative example of an environment too

strange to design aircraft around, as the practical definition of “outlier:” personal

communication, COL John R. Martin, U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies

Institute.
Atypically Poor Enemy Morale.

The native Afghan Taliban, for example, were fighting

only to prevent the extradition of a foreigner, Osama bin

Laden, whom many of them resented anyway. They might

be expected to display only limited commitment to such

modest stakes, and hence poor morale and combat

motivation would hardly be surprising. Future opponents,

by contrast, for whom much more could easily be at stake,

might be better motivated. If poor enemy morale were a

necessary precondition for the Afghan Model’s success, then

the Model might not succeed elsewhere.25

Yet much of the actual fighting was shouldered, not by

Afghan Taliban, but by foreigners, and especially by al

Qaeda—and these foreign troops were much better

motivated than their Afghan comrades. Our opponents in

this campaign were not a monolithic or homogeneous

military. Instead, their three major components (the

indigenous Afghan Taliban, the predominantly foreign al

Qaeda, and other, non-al Qaeda foreign allies of the

Taliban) differed in many important respects.26 Among the

most important of these differences was combat motivation:

whereas the indigenous Afghan Taliban quit the field

quickly, the foreigners did not. On the contrary, there are

numerous reports of foreign fighters threatening to kill any

Afghan Taliban who fled the front lines.27 At Bai Beche,

Konduz, Sayed Slim Kalay, Highway 4, and elsewhere in

the theater, al Qaeda fighters launched counterattacks to

13

25 See, e.g., John Keegan, “The Changing Face of War,” Wall Street Journal Europe,

November 26, 2001; David Perlmutter and Mohammed El-Bendary, “Phase 2:

Redefine What it is to ‘Win,’” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2001; Kevin

Whitelaw, “Round One,” U.S. News and World Report, November 26, 2001.

26 Below, “Taliban” refers collectively to all hostile forces in Afghanistan. “Afghan

Taliban” refers to the indigenous Afghan component of the Taliban’s military

forces. “Foreign Taliban” refers to all non-Afghan components, both al Qaeda and

non-al Qaeda. “Al Qaeda” refers exclusively to the forces trained in bin Laden’s

camps and associated with his organization.

27 . MHI: Memorandum for the Record, COL J. int., July 2002; Tape 032602p, CPT M.

int.
try to close with American and allied forces.28 In Operation

ANACONDA, al Qaeda defenders not only stood their

ground against overwhelming American firepower, they

actually reinforced their positions in the midst of the battle:

their fighters were willing to advance into the teeth of a

fierce bombardment to enter the Shah-i-kot Valley from

safer positions elsewhere and seek battle with our forces.29

These are not the actions of unmotivated or unwilling

troops. The non-Afghan Taliban have shown themselves to

be resolute combatants with the motivation to stay in the

field when there seemed to be something to be gained

militarily from doing so.

These better motivated foreigners were responsible for

much of the fighting in the campaign’s key actions.Though

comprising under 25 percent of the regime’s overall troop

strength, the hard-core foreigners were allocated

disproportionately to the critical sectors of the front and

bore an increasing fraction of the combat load beginning in

late October.30 By early-to-mid November, American special

forces teams were reporting predominantly al Qaeda,

rather than Afghan, opposition in the critical battles for

Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar.31 The Afghan Taliban’s

tendency to quit the field following their initial defeats

doubtless evened the numerical odds for the decisive battles

in November and December, but the key engagements at

14

28 MHI: 032602p, CPT M. int.; Memorandum for the Record, COL J. int., July 2002;

Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.; Tape 032602a, CPT H., et al. int.

29 MHI: Tape 041902p, LTC Briley int.; Tape 042002p, LTC Gray int.; Tape 041802p,

LTC Lundy int.; Tape 041802a, COL Smith int.

30 Strength estimates for Afghan armies are necessarily inexact. Most accounts,

however, credited the Taliban overall with some 40,000-50,000 troops in fall 2001,

of whom 8,000-12,000 were foreign. The foreign combatants—and especially the

Arabs—had served as the Taliban’s shock troops during the civil war, and were

widely reported to be better trained, better disciplined, better motivated and better

equipped than the Afghan Taliban. On Taliban strength, composition, and

motivation, see Anthony Davis, “Foreign Fighters Step Up Activity in Afghan Civil

War,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, Vol. 13, No. 8, August 1, 2001; Ali Jalali,

“Afghanistan: The Anatomy of an Ongoing Conflict,” Parameters, Spring 2001, pp.

85-98; Senior Defense Officials, “Background Briefing on Afghanistan,” Defense

Department News Transcript, October 12, 2001, 1:10 pm, pp. 7-9.

31 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032802p, MAJ C. int.; Tape 032602a, CPT

H. et al. int.
Bai Beche, Sayed Slim Kalay, and Highway 4 were all

fought against motivated, resolute opponents—as were the

later actions at Tora Bora and ANACONDA. If poor enemy

morale were a necessary precondition for the Afghan Model

to succeed, then the Model should thus have failed after its

initial victories in October, yet it did not.

Atypically Poor Enemy Training.

The Afghan Taliban were often very poorly trained

soldiers. Many had little or no formal military instruction,

and Afghan ranks swelled and shrank with the seasons and

the fortunes of war as troops went home to their villages or

took up arms depending on the crop cycle and apparent

military need.32 In fact, former Supreme Allied Commander

in Europe General Wesley Clark has referred to them as

“the least competent adversary we’ve faced since the

Barbary Pirates.”33 Other enemies might well be better

trained; if the Afghans’ poor skills were a necessary

precondition for their defeat, then their collapse might be

hard to replicate elsewhere.

Yet here, too, the distinction between Afghan and

foreign Taliban is important. The al Qaeda soldiers in the

key battles were much better trained than the Afghan

Taliban. Unlike the latter, which were often closer to a

civilian militia than a professional army, the al Qaeda

troops were committed, full-time soldiers. Osama bin

Laden’s infamous training camps served primarily to

prepare these troops for combat on Afghanistan’s front

lines, and taught them a curriculum not radically different

from orthodox Western armies’.34 While the result may not

15

32 See, e.g., Jalali, “Afghanistan: The Anatomy of an Ongoing Conflict;” Senior

Defense Officials, “Background Briefing on Afghanistan,” p. 8. On the Taliban

incompetence thesis more broadly, see, e.g., Jeffrey Record, “Collapsed Countries,

Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War,” Parameters, Vol. 32, No. 2,

Summer 2002, pp. 4-23.

33 Quoted in Michael R. Gordon, “‘New’ U.S. War: Commandos, Airstrikes and Allies

on the Ground,” The New York Times, December 29, 2001.

34 Though bin Laden’s camps trained both conventional soldiers and terrorists, the

latter for undercover work abroad, the former made up the great majority of the

camps’ population and output: C.J. Chivers and David Rohde, “The Jihad Files:
always have been up to contemporary Western standards,

there is no reason to suppose that al Qaeda’s skills or

training were not at least comparable to those of most other

likely opponents, few of whom are trained to Western

standards either.35 The Afghan Model’s ability to prevail

against this better-trained opposition suggests that

atypically poor enemy skill was not a necessary

precondition for success.

Atypical Lack of Popular Support for the Enemy’s

War Effort.

Many Afghans hated the Taliban and chafed under the

harshness of their regime.36 This surely weakened their

Afghan soldiers’ morale, and presumably reduced the

material and intelligence assistance a state might

otherwise expect from its citizens. Enemies with stronger

popular political support could well be much harder to

defeat.

Yet the Taliban’s unpopularity was hardly unique. Many

other potential opponents’ regimes are at least as

unpopular: Saddam, for example, hardly governs by the will

of the governed. If unpopularity makes a military unable to

resist American arms, then this hardly makes Afghanistan

unrepresentative of the future.37

16

Training the Troops,” New York Times, March 18, 2002, pp. 1ff.

35 For a discussion of one particularly germane example, see the treatment of Iraqi

Republican Guard skills in Stephen Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf

War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict,” International Security, Vol. 21, No. 2,

Fall 1996, pp. 139-179 at 158-61. On shortcomings in al Qaeda troops’ mastery of

their Western training syllabi, see MHI Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.; Tape 041902a,

CPT Lecklenburg int.; Tape 041902a, CPT Murphy int.; Tape 041902a, MAJ Busko

int.

36 See, e.g., Record, “Collapsed Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American

Way of War,” pp. 4-23.

37 There is some empirical support for the notion that democracies’ greater popular

support conveys important military advantages over non-democratic opponents:

see, e.g., David Lake, “Powerful Pacifists: Democratic States and War,” American

Political Science Review, Vol. 86, No. 1, March 1992, pp. 24-37; Dan Reiter and

Allan Stam, “Democracy, War Initiation and Victory,” American Political Science

Review, Vol. 92, No. 2, June 1998, pp. 377-89; idem, “Democracy and Battlefield

Military Effectiveness,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 42, No. 3, June 1998,

pp. 259-77; D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, “The Declining Advantages of

Democracy,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 42, No. 3, June 1998, pp. 344-66. It
Nor were the Taliban uniformly hated. In southern

Afghanistan, their traditional stronghold, they remained

popular throughout the war and indeed to this day. In fact,

in November the conventional expectation was that

Kandahar and the south would prove much harder to

conquer than Mazar and the north, given the former’s

greater sympathy for Mullah Omar and his regime.38 These

concerns proved unfounded, but not because the southern

public failed to support the government. Moreover, the

foreign Taliban were apparently undeterred by public

opinion in Afghanistan—they were waging a jihad whose

legitimacy in their minds was unrelated to the political

views of Afghans, and they fought hard regardless of the

latter. On balance, there is little reason to assume that the

Taliban’s degree of popular support was either unique or an

essential precondition for their collapse.

Atypical Enemy Willingness to Defect.

The acceptability of defection in Afghan military culture

is certainly unusual to Western eyes. Not only do many

Afghans consider it normal and acceptable to switch sides in

war, but most of their senior commanders know one another

personally from their service against the Soviets. Hence it is

probably easier to persuade an opponent to defect in

Afghanistan than in much of the rest of the world.39 And

there were certainly many defections in fall and winter of

17

is far from clear, however, whether democracies’ superior performance is

attributable to popular support or to other cultural, educational, or civil-military

traits that correlate with regime type: see Stephen Biddle and Stephen Long,

“Democratic Effectiveness?” paper presented to the American Political Science

Association 2002 Annual Meeting, Boston MA, September 1, 2002.

38 See, e.g., Jane Perlez with Michael Gordon, “Savoring Strength in the North, U.S.

Worries About Weakness in the South,” New York Times, November 12, 2001, p.

B4; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Support Deepens for the Taliban, Refugees Report,”

Washington Post, November 8, 2001, pp. A1ff; “Opposition Troops Advance Toward

Kandahar,” CNN.com, available at: http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/ asiapcf/central/

11/24/ret.afghan.kandahar.

39 See, e.g., Sharon LaFraniere, “Defectors Flee as Negotiations Resume,”

Washington Post, November 20, 2001, p. 8; David Lamb, “Missteps Toppled

Taliban, Analysts Say,” Los Angeles Times, December 27, 2001. For

counterarguments holding that Afghanistan’s ease of defection is actually fairly

widespread among tribal or clan cultures, see MHI: Memorandum for the Record,

COL J. int., 2 July 2002.
2001-02. If the Taliban’s loss of combat power resulting from

these defections were a necessary precondition for our

success, then the 2001-02 outcome might well be an

anomaly.

Yet the overwhelming majority of defections in this

campaign occurred after the military tide had turned, not

before. The largest mass turnovers came with the fall of the

northern cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Konduz on November

10 and 26, respectively.40 The key battle in the north,

however, was east of Keshende-ye Pa’in near Bai Beche on

November 5. Prior to this, the Northern Alliance and its

accompanying SOF teams had been forced to work their way

methodically up the Dar-ye Suf and Balkh river valleys,

fighting their way from one Taliban defense line to the next.

The Taliban, however, had chosen to make a stand at Bai

Beche, pushing all available reserves forward to reinforce

these positions. Once Dostum broke through their lines, the

Taliban thus had nothing left to back them up and the result

was a rout: “the dam broke,” as one Special Forces soldier

described it, with the Taliban retreating in disorder and

unable to rally or establish new blocking positions.41 The

Taliban’s consequent loss of the Dar-ye Suf corridor made

Mazar-e-Sharif untenable, and when it fell their entire

position in northern Afghanistan collapsed.42 By the time

the major defections occurred in mid-to-late November, the

military outcome in the north had thus been determined. By

contrast, before the battle at Bai Beche, the SOF

commanders operating in the north reported few if any

defections to the forces they served with.43 Moreover, even

18

40 Some 3,000 surrendered in and around Mazar, with up to another 5,000 at Konduz;

many others switched sides in the fighting at Tiengi Pass just south of Mazar: MHI:

Memorandum for the Record, COL J. int., 2 July 2002; Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.;

Andrade, The Battle for Mazar-e-Sharif, p. 4; Sherry, The Course of Enduring

Freedom in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan, p. 2; Birtle, Afghan War

Chronology, pp. 6, 8.

41 As quoted in Andrade, The Battle for Mazar-e-Sharif, p. 3. See also MHI: Tape

032602p, MAJ M., MAJ K. int.; Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.

42 Note, however, that much hard fighting remained in the south, where

predominantly foreign troops sought to defend Kandahar and its approaches: see,

e.g., Carland, The Campaign Against Kandahar.

43 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032802p, CPT D. int.
after Bai Beche, few al Qaeda voluntarily defected, and in

fact they continued to resist stubbornly around Kandahar in

the south through December 6, and fought hard at Tora

Bora and ANACONDA well into 2002.44 Some were

captured when overrun or encircled, and many tried to

blend into the population and slip away once their defenses

had been breached, but most of the voluntary defections

were by Afghan Taliban—and even for them, many stayed

and fought at least until the tide of battle turned against

them. Defections in the Afghan campaign were thus

important, but they were effects not causes; consequences of

military failure not determinants of it.

Atypical Susceptibility to Surprise.

The Afghan Model surely surprised the Taliban. Though

neither SOF nor PGMs were new, they had never been

combined in quite this way before, presenting a novel

problem to defenders.45 Other potential opponents,

however, have now seen the Model in use and are surely

studying means of thwarting it. The Taliban’s ignorance of

the Afghan Model is thus probably unique to Afghanistan—

our next opponent will not be caught as unsuspecting as the

Taliban were in October.

Yet while the Taliban were initially surprised, they

adapted quickly. As early as October 22, American SOF

teams were reporting that Taliban vehicles in their sectors

had been smeared with mud to camouflage them.46 By Bai

Beche they were already making aggressive use of overhead

19

44 Dostum, for example, is reported to have been uninterested in soliciting defections

from foreigners, preferring to kill these rather than trusting them to serve with

him. MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032602p, MAJ M., MAJ K. int.

45 For nearly a decade, the U.S. Army has been emphasizing the integration of SOF

and regular forces in its exercises at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft.

Polk, Louisiana; moreover, SOF worked extensively with indigenous allies,

(including the direction of air strikes on their behalf) in the Vietnam War. For more

on historical precedent, see the discussion below. These efforts, however, have not

had such a high profile that one could expect potential opponents to have focused on

them heretofore.

46 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int. This became widespread throughout the theater:

see, e.g., Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.; Tape 032602a, CPT H., et al., int.; Tape

032602p, MAJ M., MAJ K. int.
cover and deliberate concealment.47 In the fighting north of

Kandahar and along Highway 4 in December, al Qaeda

defenses were well-camouflaged, dispersed, and making use

of natural terrain for expedient cover.48 This pattern

continued through Operation ANACONDA in March, by

which time al Qaeda forces were practicing systematic

communications security, dispersal, camouflage discipline,

use of cover and concealment, and exploitation of dummy

fighting positions to draw fire and attention from their real

dispositions.49

Others may adopt different countermeasures, but those

the Taliban turned to by early November were the natural

choices one could expect an adaptive opponent to try to

implement when faced with capabilities like the Afghan

Model’s. Again and again, from Western Front armies’

response to artillery and machine guns in 1916-18, to the

German Wehrmacht’s response to Allied air supremacy in

northwest Europe in 1944, to the Vietcong and North

Vietnamese armies’ response to U.S. firepower in Vietnam,

armies facing overwhelming firepower have dispersed,

exploited cover and concealment, restricted their radio

transmissions, and adopted camouflage.50 In fact, this

20

47 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int. On al Qaeda’s use of cover and concealment in

southern Afghanistan, see Tape 032602a, CPT H. et al. int.; Tape 032802a, MAJ D.

int.

48 MHI: Tape 032602a, CPT H. et al. int.; Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.

49 See, e.g., MHI: AFZS-LF-B, Memo, FOB 3/3 SSE Support Intelligence Summary,

25-29 March 2002; Tape 041902p, LTC Briley int.; Tape 041902p, COL Clarke int.;

Tape 041802a, COL Smith int.; Tape 100702p, LTC Townsend int.

50 See, e.g., Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Firepower: British Army

Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945, London: Allen and Unwin, 1985; Paddy

Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1994;

G.C. Wynne, If Germany Attacks: The Battle in Depth in the West, London: Faber

and Faber, Ltd., 1940; Timothy Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: Changes in

German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War, Ft. Leavenworth KS: U.S.

Army Combat Studies Institute, 1981, Leavenworth Paper No.4; Carlo D’Este,

Decision in Normandy, New York: HarperCollins, 1983, pp. 105-334; National

Archives (hereafter NARA) RG338 FMS MS P-162, Walter Harzer, Oberst a.D.,

Der Einsatz der 9.SS-Pz.Div. “Hohenstaufen” im Westen vom 20. Juni 1944 bis 31.

Oktober 1944, p. 23; NARA RG338, FMS MS B-470, Generalmajor Sylvester

Stadler, 9.SS.Pz.Div, 20.6.44-24.7.44, p. 16; NARA RG242 T-354-623,

SS-Panzer-Grenadier-Regiment 2, Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Kriegstagebuch

Nr. 157/44, 15.7.1944 02.00 Uhr, paragraph 6; Andrew Krepinevich, The Army and

Vietnam, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986.
pattern parallels the approach suggested by several U.S.

Marine Corps officers assigned to oppose an operational

concept resembling the Afghan Model in a pre-9/11

exercise.51

Much of the actual fighting in Afghanistan thus came

against an opponent who had already begun to adopt the

standard countermeasures that one would expect to see

against the kind of firepower we employed there; the effects

of surprise were attenuated rather quickly in this

campaign. Yet the loss of surprise did not prevent us from

continuing to prevail on the battlefield. Surprise per se thus

does not appear to have been a necessary precondition for

success in Afghanistan.

Atypical Enemy Dependence on Vulnerable Sources

of Outside Support.

The Taliban had certainly enjoyed important outside

support. They were largely a creation of the Pakistani

intelligence service, the ISI, which continued to supply

them with materiel, tactical advice, and intelligence

throughout the civil war. Shortly after September 11,

Pakistani President Pervez Musharaff threw his support to

the United States and pledged to end ISI assistance to the

Taliban, who could thus have expected to lose a major

source of outside assistance. Relative to other potential

opponents, the Taliban might thus be considered unusually

vulnerable to such a cutoff.

Yet aid withdrawal was probably not decisive. The key

battles were fought in early November and December.

Pakistani aid continued to reach the Taliban until at least

October 12, and may have continued even after that.52 Most

militaries stockpile supplies against the possibility of

21

51 Maj. John Schmitt, “A Critique of the HUNTER WARRIOR Concept,” Marine

Corps Gazette, Vol. 82, No. 6, June 1998, pp. 13-19; Capt. Michael Lindemann, “An

Opposing Force Perspective of Advanced Warfighting Experiment HUNTER

WARRIOR,” Marine Corps Gazette, Vol. 82, No. 6, June 1998, pp. 20-26.

52 Douglas Frantz, “Supplying the Taliban: Pakistan Ended Aid to Taliban Only

Hesitantly,” New York Times, December 8, 2001, pp. 1ff.
interdiction, hence supply cutoffs typically take time to

affect battlefield outcomes. Even if all outside sources had

dried up instantly on October 12, it is unlikely that such a

short period of isolation could have induced catastrophic

military consequences for the Taliban. And in fact,

American inspection of captured Taliban positions indicates

that they remained well-stocked (especially with

ammunition) through at least March 2002.53 Nor does the

withdrawal of Pakistani intelligence or tactical advice

appear to have had decisive effects. Sympathetic civilians

have regularly provided al Qaeda with information on

Allied movements with or without help from the ISI; this

problem was aggravated with the return of Afghan Taliban

fighters to their home villages following their initial defeats,

placing thousands of still-hostile observers in villages

across the country.54 Enemy tactics, moreover, typically

improved, not decayed, as the war has progressed and more

sophisticated al Qaeda fighters replaced less-skilled

Afghans—withdrawal of ISI tactical assistance hardly

undid the Taliban tactically.55 In all, there is little basis to

see the Pakistani aid cutoff as a necessary precondition for

success.

Atypical Availability of Safe Havens for Training

and Equipping Indigenous Allies.

The Northern Alliance controlled an unusually large

contiguous territory in which they could be resupplied,

retrained, and reequipped: perhaps 10-15 percent of

Afghanistan’s total land area was under their control prior

to American intervention.56 Other potential allies might not

enjoy such extensive or contiguous safe havens. If resupply,

22

53 MHI: AFZS-LF-B, Memo, Operation Polar Harpoon Intelligence Summary, 23

March 2002; AFZS-LF-B, Memo, FOB 3/3 SSE Support Intelligence Summary,

25-29 March 2002; Tape 041902p, LTC Briley int.; Tape 100702p, LTC Townsend

int.

54 MHI: Tape 041802p, LTC Lundy int.; Tape 041802a, COL Smith int.; also Ilene

Prusher, “Al Qaeda Plotted New U.S. Attacks,” Christian Science Monitor, March

18, 2002, p. 1.

55 See the preceding discussion of Taliban tactical adaptation and associated

references.
retraining, and reequipment were necessary preconditions

for the Afghan Model’s success, then this territorial

advantage might make the 2001 outcome idiosyncratic.

Yet here, too, the tide turned before its effects could

become decisive. Most of the key SOF teams were calling air

strikes and supporting Northern Alliance offensives within

hours of arriving in Afghanistan—the fighting was well

under way before the Americans could do any significant

retraining, and before any major resupply could be

accomplished.57 Once the battle was joined, moreover, the

high tempo of operations made it impossible for American

SOF to pause long enough to conduct training. Some food

and other humanitarian aid arrived quickly, but few

weapons and little ammunition were dropped prior to the

critical battle at Bai Beche: Dostum’s first significant lethal

aid delivery was not until 2:00 a.m. on November 5, that is,

the predawn hours of the day of the battle itself. And even

then, this aid was limited to small arms, ammunition, and

rocket propelled grenades—no heavy weapons or armored

vehicles were provided.58 Most of the key battles were thus

fought by Afghan allies with skills and equipment little

different from what they had in the civil war; Afghanistan’s

suitability for retraining and reequipping played little role

in the outcome.

EXISTING VIEWS: AFGHAN MODEL LETHALITY

There is thus substantial evidence that the campaign

was not merely a fluke, hence its implications may have

some real meaning for the future. But are those implications

necessarily the ones that Afghan Model proponents now

see? In fact, they are not—because the Model did not

23

56 International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 2001-2002,

London: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 160.

57 MHI: Tape 032602p, MAJ M., MAJ K. int.; Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape

032802p, CPT D. int.

58 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int. Atta’s forces received a misdirected lethal aid

drop originally intended for Dostum (who was to distribute the materiel equally

among the several warlords in the region) the night of October 31-November 1, but

this aid was used only by Atta’s troops: ibid.
actually work in Afghanistan the way most now think it did.

And its actual performance implies a less radical departure

from past military practice than many Afghan Model

proponents argue.

For the Afghan Model to be a widely applicable template

suitable for restructuring the U.S. military, several key

features must have obtained in Afghanistan:

SOF and standoff sensors must have been able to find

key targets for precision engagement;

PGMs must have been able to kill the targets found, at

standoff ranges; and,

The indigenous allies’ role must have been

undemanding.

The first two conditions are logically necessary for the

efficacy of the PGMs around which the Model is built—

strike systems must be able to find and kill the critical

targets at long range, before enemies can close with and

overwhelm the small SOF teams on the ground. The third,

however, is at least as important. We can almost always find

local allies, but armies vary widely in skill, equipment, and

motivation; some will be capable of demanding tasks, but

others not. Much of the Model’s apparent power in

Afghanistan was due to the perception that our local allies

there were not terribly capable; if SOF and PGMs can make

conquerors out of such modest material then they can do so

in many other places, it is often supposed. In particular, the

key roles implied for the allies are to screen U.S. SOF from

hostile patrols or infiltrators too small to make good targets

for PGM attack; to mop up surviving remnants; and to

occupy abandoned territory (it is often politically important

that local forces be the ones to take control of the ground

that the PGMs effectively clear). If the allies’ mission

becomes much more demanding than this, then both the

generality and the novelty of the Afghan Model come into

question—after all, allies like the Israelis or the British

24
have always been capable of impressive feats with or

without American PGMs; the claim that the Afghan Model

is a revolutionary departure rests on the perception that it

turned an overmatched militia into a juggernaut.

In Afghanistan, however, these three conditions were

not always met. SOF and standoff sensors found many

targets, but could not ensure acquisition of properly

concealed opponents. PGMs were very lethal, but against

well-entrenched positions they could not destroy enough to

prevent survivors from halting unsophisticated attackers.

Our indigenous allies’ role was undemanding at times, but

far more challenging at others. In particular, significant

numbers of properly prepared al Qaeda positions eluded

SOF and remote target acquisition and survived even

extensive air strikes. To take such positions required

orthodox combined arms, fire-and-maneuver tactics—even

with the intense precision fire support available in this

campaign. Such tactics are difficult to execute, and require

skills and leadership many potential indigenous allies lack;

in fact, not all our Afghan allies in 2001-02 were up to the

job. Where the available ground forces faced skilled enemies

but had the necessary skills themselves, American

firepower brought decisive victory. But where our ground

elements lacked the needed skills or motivation, offensives

against capable enemies stalled and outcomes were

frequently in doubt in spite of American air support. In

Afghanistan, friendly ground forces were mostly as good as

their enemies, hence our theater offensive as a whole

overwhelmed the Taliban and drove their regime from

power. But the variations in tactical behavior in this

campaign produced important variations in local

outcomes—and these differences teach important lessons

about how future wars with different balances of ground

force skill and motivation might turn out.59 These lessons in

25

59 That is, by reducing the unit of analysis from the theater campaign to the tactical

engagement it becomes possible to increase the number of cases for analysis and

create important variance in independent and dependent variable values. This in

turn permits much more discriminating causal analysis than would otherwise be

possible in a single-case research design. On this technique of subunit analysis and

the associated methodological considerations, see, esp. Gary King, Robert Keohane
turn imply a different understanding of cause and effect in

Afghanistan, a different model for the future of warfare, and

different implications for Army and defense policy.

To show why, I address each of the three key conditions

in turn.

Target Acquisition in Afghanistan.

In the campaign’s early stages, enemy targets were

exposed and relatively easy to acquire. The Afghan Taliban

commonly deployed on ridge crests, silhouetting themselves

for SOF observation. Afghan defenders made little or no

effort to camouflage or conceal their positions. They

engaged in casual, exposed movement in the target area,

often emerging to inspect bomb craters while still under

surveillance. Armored vehicles and crew-served weapons

were deployed without revetments or apparent efforts at

cover or concealment. As a result, their positions were easily

identified for PGM targeting, sometimes from extraordinary distances.

At Bishqab on October 21, for example, U.S. SOF

observers acquired Taliban targets at ranges of 8-10

kilometers.60 At Cobaki on October 22, Taliban observation

posts were easily spotted at 1500-2000 meters.61 At Zard

Kammar on October 28, Taliban defensive positions were

visible from a mile away.62 At Ac’capruk on November 4,

exposed Taliban combat vehicles and crew-served weapons

on hillsides west of the Balkh river could be identified from

SOF observation posts on the Koh-i-Almortak ridge line

some 4-5 kilometers distant.63 At Polanyi Canyon near

Bamiyan on November 7, Taliban positions were plainly

visible from more than four kilometers away.64 Taliban

26

and Sidney Verba, Designing Social Inquiry, Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1994, pp. 217-23.

60 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.

61 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.

62 Kirk Spitzer, “Green Berets Outfought, Outthought the Taliban,” USA Today,

January 7, 2002, pp. 1ff.

63 MHI: Tape 032802p, CPT D. int.
counterattacks, as at Tarin Kowt on November 18, were

conducted in the open with no evident attempt at

concealment, dispersal, or covering fire to keep U.S. or allied

observers’ heads down or to complicate target acquisition.65

This changed as the campaign continued and as the

opposition shifted increasingly from Afghan Taliban to al

Qaeda. In the November 5 battle at Bai Beche, for example,

al Qaeda’s defensive works greatly complicated American

target acquisition. While American SOF observers knew

they faced an interconnected trench system with the enemy

somewhere within it, and while particular strongpoints

could be identified for engagement, al Qaeda’s local cover

and concealment were good enough to prevent the SOF from

locating the entirety of the enemy’s individual fighting

positions, many of which could not be singled out for

precision attack.66

By the December fighting along Highway 4 south of

Kandahar, not even this was available. In fact, concealed al

Qaeda defensive positions among a series of culverts and in

27

64 MHI: Tape 032702a, CPT T. et al. int. Some targets in this region were visible at

ranges of up to 10 kilometers: ibid.

65 MHI: Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.; Tape 041902p, COL Clarke int.; see also Karl

Vick, “In a Desert Outpost, Afghan War Was Won,” Washington Post, December 31,

2001, pp. 1ff.; Peter Finn, “Wounded Army Captain Details Teamwork Against

Taliban,” Washington Post, December 11, 2001, pp. 1ff; Jonathan Weisman, “A

Soldier’s Story: U.S. Backbone Wins Battle,” USA Today, December 26, 2001, p. 5.

Note that the Taliban military’s compartmentation and poor communications

meant that learning often proceeded at different rates in different parts of the

front. In the north, for example, Taliban defenders who had seen the effects of

Allied bombing at Bishqab, Cobaki, and Oimetan had already begun to adopt

careful camouflage and overhead cover by November 5 at Bai Beche, whereas

Taliban defenders around Ac’capruk, which had not been extensively bombed

before November 4, did not. MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032802p, CPT

D. int.. Similarly, the Taliban experience in the north filtered down to units in the

south more slowly than it did among units within the northern fighting—hence the

early southern counterattack at Tarin Kowt was massed and exposed in the open,

rather than covered and concealed as were their later efforts at Sayed Slim Kalay

or along Highway 4. In each case, however, the affected units learned quickly from

their own experience, and adaptation followed rapidly after the initial air strikes.

66 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int. Similarly, a system of bunkers dug into a hillside

southeast of Sholgerah at Tash Kanda could not be located despite repeated

attempts by a variety of American reconnaissance systems to pinpoint it for

precision engagement. Although intelligence reports indicated its presence in the

area, the actual positions could not be located until American SOF drove past it on

the ground during the post-Bai Beche pursuit up the Dar-ye Suf River valley: ibid.
burned-out vehicle hulks alongside the road remained

wholly undetected by any friendly element until their fire

drove back an AMF (Afghan Military Forces—our Northern

and Southern Alliance allies) advance. An al Qaeda

counterattack in the same sector using a system of wadis for

cover approached undetected to within 100-200 meters of

AMF and American SOF positions along the highway before

opening fire on friendly forces.67

At the village of Sayed Slim Kalay north of Kandahar

between December 2-4, concealed al Qaeda defenders

likewise remained undetected until they fired upon

unsuspecting U.S. and AMF attackers. An al Qaeda

counterattack using local terrain for cover maneuvered into

small arms range of friendly defenders before being driven

back.68

At Operation ANACONDA in March 2002, an intensive

pre-battle reconnaissance effort focused every available

surveillance and target acquisition system on a tiny,

ten-by-ten kilometer battlefield. Yet fewer than 50 percent

of all the al Qaeda positions ultimately identified in the

course of the fighting on this battlefield were discovered

prior to ground contact. In fact, most fire received by U.S.

forces in ANACONDA came from initially unseen,

unanticipated al Qaeda fighting positions.69

How could such things happen in an era of persistent

reconnaissance drones, airborne radars, satellite

surveillance, thermal imaging, and hypersensitive

electronic eavesdropping equipment? The answer is that

the earth’s surface remains an extremely complex

environment with an abundance of natural and manmade

cover and concealment available for those militaries

capable of exploiting it.

28

67 MHI: Tape 032602a, CPT H., et al., int.

68 MHI: Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.

69 MHI: Tape 041902p, LTC Briley int.; Tape 042002p, LTC Gray int.; Tape 041802p,

LTC Lundy int.; Tape 041802p, LTC Preysler int.; Tape 041902a, MAJ Busko int.;

Tape 041902a, CPT Murphy int.; Tape 041902a, CPT Lecklenburg int.
Figure 2 provides a concrete illustration of this problem

in the form of a photograph of an al Qaeda fighting position

from Objective Ginger on the Anaconda battlefield.70 The

yellow arrow indicates the al Qaeda defenders’ location;

without the arrow, there would be no visible sign of a combat

position even from the nearly point blank range at which

this photograph was taken. Overhanging rock in turn

provides cover and concealment from overhead surveillance

systems. In principle one might hope to observe resupply

movement or al Qaeda patrols into or out of such positions,

or to overhear radio communications from its occupants. Al

Qaeda soldiers wearing the flowing robes of local herdsmen

and traveling in small parties among the mountains,

however, are nearly impossible to distinguish at a distance

from the noncombatants who tend goats or travel through

29

Figure 2. Al Qaeda Fighting Position Sanger,

Objective Ginger, Shah-i-kot Valley.

70 Photo taken from MHI: AFZS-LF-B, Memo, FOB 3/3 SSE Support Intelligence

Summary, March 25-29, 2002.
30

Figure 3. The Whale, Shah-i-kot Valley.

Figure 4. Objective Ginger, Shah-i-kot Valley.
such areas as a matter of routine.71 And defenders able to

operate under radio listening silence while communicating

using runners, landlines or other non-broadcast means can

reduce signals intercepts to a level that makes

identification of specific fighting positions very problematic.

Against such targets, it is far from clear that any

surveillance technology coming any time soon will ensure

reliable target acquisition from standoff distances.

Nor are positions such as this one rare anomalies or

atypical of Afghan terrain more generally. Figures 3 and 4

show broader samples of the Shah-i-kot battlefield on which

Anaconda was fought, including the features known as “The

Whale” (after a similar rock formation at the U.S. National

Training Center at Ft. Irwin California) and Objective

Ginger, respectively.72 Almost any of the dozens of shadows,

crevices, or folds in the earth scattered across these

landscapes could house positions like the one shown in

Figure 2. And this is just a tiny subset of even the Anaconda

battlefield, which is itself a tiny subset of Afghanistan as a

whole. The natural complexity of such surfaces offers any

adaptive opponent with the necessary training and skills a

multitude of opportunities to thwart even modern remote

surveillance systems. Against such opponents, remote

surveillance will still detect some targets, and remote

sensors remain crucial assets, but the only sure means of

target acquisition is direct ground contact: a ground force

whose advance threatens objectives that the enemy cannot

sacrifice and thus must defend compels them to give away

their locations by firing on their attackers. Skilled attackers

can eventually locate any defensive position by observing

the source of the fire directed at them—and this, in fact, is

how the majority of the al Qaeda positions at Anaconda

were found.

31

71 The author observed many such individuals and small parties among the high

ridge lines and mountain valleys of Paktia Province during helicopter travel

between Bagram AFB and the Shah-i-kot valley in April 2002.

72 Photographs taken by the author, April 20, 2002.
Nor is this problem unique to Afghanistan or its

mountainous terrain. Militarily exploitable cover is

commonplace in almost all likely future theaters of war. For

targets who observe radio listening silence, as al Qaeda now

does, foliage, for example, degrades all current remote

sensor technologies; urban areas provide overhead cover,

create background clutter, and pose difficult problems of

distinguishing military targets from innocent civilians.73

Each is widely available. More than 26 percent of Somalia’s

land area is wooded or urban, as is more than 20 percent of

the Sudan’s, 34 percent of Georgia’s, or 46 percent of the

Philippines’.74 This cover, moreover, is often distributed in

small, widespread patches. On the GOODWOOD battlefield

of 1944 in Normandy, for example, over 80 percent of all

one-kilometer grid squares now contain at least some forest

or urban cover (though only 26 percent of the total land area

is covered).75 In most countries, the central geostrategic

objectives are urban areas; even where the bulk of the

national land area is open desert (as in Iraq), the cities are

both the key terrain and an ample source of cover from

overhead sensors (Baghdad alone covers more than 300

square kilometers).76 Among the most important themes in

the history of modern tactics is the growth of methods for

exploiting such cover to reduce vulnerability to modern

firepower—the “empty battlefield” that has characterized

32

73 See, e.g., Alan Vick, et al., Enhancing Air Power’s Contribution Against Light

Infantry Targets, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1996, pp. 13-30; Peter Brooks and

Edward Smith, “Evaluation of Airborne Surveillance Systems,” IDA Research

Summaries, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter/Spring 1996, pp. 4-5; Dominick Giglio, “Overview

of Foliage/Ground Penetration and Interferometric SAR Experiments,” SPIE

Proceedings, Vol. 2230, 1994, pp. 209-17; Tony Capaccio, “An Army Bosnia Review

Rates JSTARS a ‘White Elephant,’” Defense Week, November 25, 1996, pp.1ff;

idem, “NATO Strikes Must Pierce the Fog of War,” Defense Week, Vol. 15, No. 7,

Feb. 14, 1994, pp.1ff; Captain Kristin M. Baker, untitled, Military Intelligence,

October-December 1996, pp. 27-29; Lt. Col. Collin A. Agee, untitled, Military

Intelligence, October-December 1996, pp. 6-12. For a more detailed discussion, see

Stephen Biddle, “The Past as Prologue: Assessing Theories of Future Warfare,”

Security Studies Vol. 8, No. 1, Autumn 1998, pp. 1-74 at 24-6.

74 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook, 2001, available at http://www.

cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

75 Institut Geographique National Carte Serie M761, Feuilles XVI-12 (Caen) and

XVI-13 (Mezidon.)

76 http://media.maps.com/magellan/Images/BAGHDA-W1.gif
the modern era is a product of skilled armies’ ability to find

cover sufficient to thwart standoff target acquisition and to

exploit this cover to perform meaningful military missions

without excessive exposure.77

This is not to suggest that modern sensors are useless or

that anyone anywhere can fight effectively from cover

opaque to standoff observation. To find and exploit cover

while taking or holding ground requires a very demanding

set of tactical skills. Historically, armies have varied widely

in their ability to do this, and in fact the Afghan campaign

itself displays substantial variation in the Taliban’s ability

to do so: the Afghan Taliban early in the fighting were

systematically unable to do so; only the foreign Taliban and

al Qaeda encountered later in the campaign proved able to

contest territory from covered, concealed positions. The less

skilled the opponent, the more exposed they will be to

remote target acquisition. And no army can disappear

utterly: diligent reconnaissance will always uncover part of

an enemy’s dispositions; the better the sensors, the more

they will find, and today’s sensors can find enough to be a

crucial contributor to success in theaters like Afghanistan.

But this is not to say that they can find enough—on their

own—to break a skilled, resolute opponent by standoff fires

alone. Even today’s best sensors are still far from an ability

to acquire most or all of a hostile force that has learned to

exploit the natural complexity of the earth’s surface for

cover and concealment—as our experience against al Qaeda

in 2001-02 demonstrates.

PGM Lethality in Afghanistan.

The second logical requirement for Afghan Model

effectiveness is PGM lethality: standoff weaponry must be

33

77 Modern fire-and-movement, combined arms tactics turn on exploitation of natural

cover: Stephen Biddle, “Land Warfare: Theory and Practice,” in John Baylis,

James Wirtz, Eliot Cohen, and Colin Gray, eds., Strategy in the Contemporary

World, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 91-112; also Bidwell and

Graham, Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945;

Jonathan House, Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century, Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 2001; John English, On Infantry, New York: Praeger,

1984.
able to kill the targets acquired. As with target acquisition,

however, lethality varied widely in Afghanistan as a

function of the targets’ tactics.

Where the Taliban presented exposed or massed targets

in the open, PGMs were extremely lethal. At Tarin Kowt on

November 18, for example, Taliban forces tried to recapture

the village by advancing in a column of vehicles up an

exposed road. Frightened AMF defenders were prepared to

abandon the village, but precision air strikes called in by

American commandos located on an overlooking ridgeline

decimated the Taliban column, whose survivors fled the

scene in disorder.78 Taliban reserves ordered forward to

reinforce their defenses at Bai Beche were caught moving in

the open along Highway 326 between Sholgerah and

Keshendeh-ye Pa’in and were slaughtered by American

airpower; officers who surveyed the scene afterward said it

brought to mind the infamous “Highway of Death” leading

out of Kuwait City in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.79 Taliban

armored vehicles and heavy weapons left parked on the

surface were routinely destroyed by pinpoint PGM attacks

as at Bagram on October 20, Oimetan on October 25,

Ac’capruk on November 4-7, or Polanyi Canyon on

November 7.80 Crude foxholes dug in the open without

overhead cover or effective concealment were regularly

annihilated by precision bombing with satellite-guided

2,000 pound Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).81

Where fighting positions were properly prepared,

however, they were much harder to destroy—even with

modern PGMs. At Bai Beche, for example, al Qaeda’s

fighting positions offered ample overhead cover and

34

78 Carland, The Campaign Against Kandahar, p. 3; Vick, “In a Desert Outpost,

Afghan War Was Won;” Finn, “Wounded Army Captain Details Teamwork Against

Taliban;” Weisman, “A Soldier’s Story.”

79 MHI: Memorandum for the Record, COL J. int., 2 July 2002; Tape 032602p, CPT M.

int.

80 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032802p, CPT D. int.; Tape 032702a, CPT

T. et al. int.; Dana Priest, “‘Team 555’ Shaped a New Way of War,” Washington

Post, April 3, 2002, pp. 1ff.

81 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032702a, CPT T. et al. int.
reinforced firing positions from which attackers could be

engaged without exposing the garrison. Though the

defenders could not all be located individually within this

trench system, American commandos knew the system’s

extent and thus called for heavy bombing across the entire

position for more than 2 days. Yet even after all this, enough

defenders survived to thwart Dostum’s initial attack.82

In the Qala-e-Gangi fortress uprising, the renegade

prisoners were quickly driven out of the above-ground

prison yard and isolated in a handful of small underground

chambers whose locations and perimeter were well-known.

These were then pounded by allied airpower: entire

ammunition payloads of multiple AC-130 gunships and no

fewer than seven 2,000-pound JDAMs were expended

against this tiny area. Yet the defenders survived and

continued to resist until succumbing only to the medieval

technology of flooding by cold water.83

In Operation ANACONDA, well-prepared al Qaeda

positions survived repeated aerial attack by U.S. PGMs. On

Objective Ginger, for example, American infantry

inadvertently disembarked from their assault helicopters

almost on top of an unseen al Qaeda position on March 2;

after being pinned down for much of the day, they were

extracted that night. American troops then spent much of

the next 10 days fighting their way back toward the Ginger

hilltop from more secure landing zones well to the north. In

the meantime, American aircraft pounded the hill. Yet in

spite of over a week of sustained heavy bombing, al Qaeda

positions on Ginger survived to fire upon U.S. infantry when

the latter finally reached and overran the objective. One

dug-in al Qaeda command post was found surrounded by no

fewer than five JDAM craters, yet its garrison survived and

resisted until they were overrun by U.S. infantry.84

35

82 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.; Tape 032602p, MAJ M., MAJ K. int.

83 MHI: Tape 032602p, MAJ M. int., MAJ K., int.

84 MHI: Tape 041802p, LTC Lundy int.; Tape 042002p, LTC Gray int.; Tape 100702p,

LTC Townsend int.; Birtle, Afghan War Chronology, pp. 14-16.
This is not to suggest that precision firepower is not

extremely lethal, or that even well dug-in al Qaeda defenses

did not suffer heavy losses from precision engagements. But

the evidence does indicate that a combination of cover and

concealment can allow defenders, though battered, to

survive modern firepower in sufficient numbers to mount

serious resistance.

Nor is this the first time that properly prepared defenses

have survived massive firepower, precise or otherwise.

French defenses at Verdun in 1916 endured a 2-day German

artillery barrage equal to about 1,200 tons of explosives—in

nuclear parlance more than a kiloton, or more explosive

power than the W48 tactical nuclear warhead—yet enough

of the entrenched defenders survived this maelstrom to halt

the German assault.85 In 1917, German defenses at

Messines absorbed more than a kiloton of explosive power

per mile of frontage, yet still halted the ensuing British

offensive.

86 At Cassino on March 15, 1944, German

positions in the village were struck by 300 tons of bombs in a

single day, yet defeated the associated Allied infantry

advance.87 On July 18, 1944, more than 4,500 Allied

aircraft, three corps’ worth of artillery, and naval gunfire

from two Royal Navy cruisers and the monitor Roberts

deposited more than 8,700 tons of explosives—over eight

kilotons of firepower—on just seven kilometers of German

frontage in less than three hours in Operation

85 C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914-1918, Chicago: Academy,

1991 ed. of 1934 orig., p. 245; weight of explosive per shell inferred from John

Keegan, The Face of Battle, New York: Random House, 1977, p. 235. For W48 yield,

see Thomas Cochran et al., Nuclear Weapons Databook Vol. I: U.S. Nuclear Forces

and Capabilities, Cambridge: Ballinger, 1984, p. 54.

86 On the eve of the battle, British General Hubert Plumer is said to have observed to

his staff: “Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow, but we shall certainly

change the geography.” Ian Hogg, The Guns, 1914-1918, New York: Ballantine,

1971, p. 131. On the artillery program at Messines, see John Terraine, “Indirect

Fire as a Battle Winner/Loser,” in Corelli Barnett, et al. Old Battles and New

Defenses: Can We Learn from Military History?, London: Brassey’s, 1986, pp. 7-32

at p. 11; weight of explosive per shell is computed from Keegan, The Face of Battle,

p. 235, and Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front,

Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 363.

87 Martin Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of

Military History, 1969, pp. 433-48.
GOODWOOD.88 Yet the entrenched Germans halted the

subsequent British armored advance, killing more than

one-third of all the British armor on the continent in the

process.89 Firepower on such scales is tremendously

destructive, and each of these defenders suffered heavily

under such barrages. But even fantastic volumes of

firepower alone cannot annihilate defenses outright.

Precision allows crushing firepower to be delivered using

vastly fewer platforms, but to expect precision to accomplish

what literally nuclear-scale fires have not been able to

attain in the past is to ask too much of new technology. The

village of Cassino was struck by far less accurate weapons

than the al Qaeda defenders of Objective Ginger, but this

tiny 500 by 700 meter Italian hamlet was still hit with the

equivalent of more than 300 2000-pound JDAMs, which was

more than enough to reduce every building in the village to

rubble—but not enough to exterminate its defenders.90 The

problem at Verdun, Messines, Cassino, or Operation

GOODWOOD was not any inability to turn defenses into

crater fields or reduce specific buildings to rubble without

today’s precision—the problem was that resolute defenders

can survive even within crater fields and rubble piles to

mount serious resistance. Firepower is critical, but against

resolute, well-prepared defenders it has rarely been

sufficient by itself in the past; taken together, Bai Beche,

Qala-e-Gangi, and Operation ANACONDA suggest that it

may not be now, either.

37

88 Department of the Scientific Advisor to the Army Council, Military Operational

Research Unit Report No. 23: Battle Study, Operation “Goodwood,” October 1946,

declassified 16 January 1984, pp. 13-20; L.F. Ellis, Victory in the West, Vol. I: The

Battle of Normandy, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1962, pp. 337-40.

89 Martin Blumenson, Breakout and Pursuit, Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of

Military History, 1961, p. 193; Carlo D’Este, Decision in Normandy, New York:

HarperCollins, 1983, pp. 385-6.

90 Note that almost 1,000 tons of bombs, plus another 2,500-4,000 tons of artillery

shells, were directed at the German positions—of this total, 300 tons of bombs and

an unknown volume of artillery fire fell within the limits of the village itself:

Blumenson, Salerno to Cassino, pp. 433-48; map 9, p. 323. Though less than half

the total firepower thus fell within the objective area, this was still a crushing

tonnage in absolute terms.
The Role of Indigenous Allies in Afghanistan.

The third logical precondition for a broadly applicable

Afghan Model is that it be effective without placing heavy

demands on indigenous allies’ tactical sophistication. Here,

too, experience in Afghanistan varied importantly.

Early in the campaign, it was not uncommon for Taliban

defenders to withdraw after SOF-directed standoff bombing

destroyed key positions. At Polanyi Canyon, for example,

the AMF advance following initial air strikes found only

abandoned (or destroyed) Taliban positions and met no

residual resistance.91

This, too, changed after the early engagements. The

remainder of the campaign saw extensive close combat.

Moreover, this close combat was neither trivial nor wholly

one-sided: many of the outcomes were close calls, involving

initial reverses, heavy AMF losses, or both.

At Bai Beche on November 5, for example, the dug-in al

Qaeda defenders refused to withdraw in spite of over 2 days

of heavy American air strikes. To dislodge them, Dostum’s

AMF cavalry was ordered to charge the position. The first

attempt was driven back. The American SOF attached to

Dostum’s forces observed this reverse and began calling

renewed airstrikes against the al Qaeda positions in

anticipation that Dostum would eventually order a second

assault. In the process, however, a SOF warning order to the

cavalry to prepare for another push was mistaken by the

cavalry as a command to launch the assault, with the result

that the cavalry began its attack much sooner than

intended. The surprised Americans watched the Afghan

cavalry break cover and begin their advance just as a series

of laser-guided bombs had been released from American

aircraft in response to the SOF calls for air support. The

SOF commander reported that he was convinced they had

just caused a friendly fire incident: the bomb release and the

AMF cavalry advance were way too close together for official

38

91 MHI: Tape 032702a, CPT T. et al. int.
doctrinal limits, and the air strike would never have been

ordered if the SOF had known that the cavalry was then

jumping off for the second assault. As it happened, the

bombs landed seconds before the cavalry arrived on the

position. In fact, the cavalry galloped through the enormous

cloud of smoke and dust that was still hanging in the air

after the explosions, emerging behind the enemy defenses

before their garrison knew what was happening. The

defenders, seeing Dostum’s cavalry to their rear, abandoned

their positions in an attempt to avoid encirclement.92

The result was an important victory—in fact, the victory

that turned the tide in the campaign. But the battle

involved serious close combat (cavalry overrunning

prepared, actively resisting defenses), and the outcome was

a very close call. Dostum’s assault profited from an

extremely tight integration of movement with suppressive

fire—far tighter, in fact, than either Dostum’s troops or

their supporting SOF would ever have dared arrange

deliberately. Luck thus played an important role in the

outcome. Dostum might well have carried the position

eventually even without the good fortune of an

extraordinary integration of fire and movement; this was

clearly a crucial battle, and he would presumably have

redoubled his efforts if the second attempt had failed. But as

fought, the outcome involved an important element of

serendipity.

Nor was Bai Beche unique in demanding hard fighting at

close quarters. As noted above, al Qaeda counterattackers

reached small arms range of U.S. and AMF forces before

being driven back at Sayed Slim Kalay and at Highway 4.93

At Konduz in late November, al Qaeda counterattackers

penetrated AMF positions deeply enough to compel

supporting American SOF teams to withdraw at least three

times to avoid being overrun.94 In Operation ANACONDA,

AMF forces associated with General Mohammed Zia and

39

92 MHI: Tape 032602p, CPT M. int.

93 MHI: Tape 032802a, MAJ D. int.; Tape 032602a, CPT H. et al. int.

94 MHI: Memorandum for the Record, COL J. int., July 2, 2002.
supported by American SOF were assigned to drive al

Qaeda defenders from the “Tri-cities” area (the villages of

Shirkankeyl, Babakuhl and Marzak); they were instead

pinned down under hostile fire from prepared defenses in

the surrounding mountainsides and eventually withdrew

after they proved unable to advance. Only after the al Qaeda

defenders pulled back under joint, multinational attack by

allied airpower, U.S. infantry, and multinational SOF, were

the AMF able to enter the Tri-cities and adjoining

ridgelines.95 At Tora Bora, massive American bombing

proved insufficient to compensate for the AMF’s

unwillingness to close with dug-in al Qaeda defenders in the

cave complexes of the White Mountains; many now see this

ground force hesitancy as having allowed Osama bin Laden

and much of his command structure to escape capture and

flee into neighboring Pakistan.96

Among these examples, the fighting along Highway 4 in

December is particularly instructive. Shirzai’s Afghans

here were divided among two factions. The first,

commanded by Haji Gul Alai, were very capable troops by

Afghan standards. They used terrain for cover and

concealment, maintained good intervals between elements

in the advance, moved by alternate bounds, exploited

suppressive fire to cover moving elements’ exposure, and

were able to exploit the effects of American air strikes by

coordinating their movement with the bombing (which

many AMF factions could not). The second faction, by

contrast, were much less skilled: the attached SOF

commander characterized them as “an armed mob—just

villagers given weapons.” Their tactics consisted of exposed,

bunched-up movement in the open, with no attempt to use

the terrain to reduce their exposure, and little ability to

employ supporting or suppressive fires. At the Arghestan

40

95 MHI: Tape 042002p, LTC Gray int.; Memorandum for the Record, COL J. int., July

2, 2002.

96 See, e.g., Barton Gellman and Thomas Ricks, “U.S. Concludes Bin Laden Escaped

at Tora Bora Fight; Failure to Send Troops in Pursuit Termed Major Error,”

Washington Post, April 17, 2002, p. 1; William Arkin, “Dropping 15,000 Pounds of

Frustration,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2001.
Bridge on December 5, this second faction launched an

assault on a dug-in al Qaeda position south of the Kandahar

airport. Driven back repeatedly, they proved unable to take

the position, in spite of U.S. air support. Only after these

troops were withdrawn and Haji Gul Alai’s forces took over

the assault the following day could the al Qaeda positions be

taken.97

What conclusions should be drawn from this experience?

Will American infantry be needed any time the United

States uses force? Not necessarily: where our Afghan allies

met their enemies on something like an equal tactical

footing, U.S. air power and small SOF teams made all the

difference. With such support, unsophisticated allies

overwhelmed unsophisticated opponents at Polanyi Canyon

and Tarin Kowt—and better-skilled allies beat comparably

skilled, resolute opponents at Bai Beche and Highway 4.

But does this mean that American air power can turn

unskilled, unsophisticated allies into conquerors even when

facing enemies with superior skill and resolution, as many

now suppose? No. By and large, the Afghan campaign pitted

ground forces of roughly comparable ability and equipment:

the net result of years of civil warfare had been a stalemate

in which the Taliban had proved unable to dislodge the

Northern Alliance from the roughly 15 percent of

Afghanistan that it held prior to September 11. But though

the typical combat units on each side were thus about

equally matched (as the stalled pre-intervention battle lines

imply), both armies were actually diverse mixtures of

better- and worse-trained, more- and less-motivated

troops—and this diversity offers a couple of valuable

opportunities to observe instances of unequally-skilled

forces in combat. In such unequal fights as the first day at

Arghestan Bridge and the assault on the Tri-cities in

Anaconda, the results suggest that where our allies are

substantially overmatched tactically, American air power

and SOF support per se may not be enough to turn the tide.

41

97 MHI: Tape 032602a, CPT H. et al. int.; Memorandum for the Record, CPT H. int.,

July 2, 2002.
Even where the balance of skills was closer to parity, as at

Bai Beche, the results could still be perilously close calls.

If SOF-directed air power had simply annihilated

Taliban forces at standoff range, as some now suppose, then

even a radically unsophisticated army would have been

sufficient to walk in and occupy the blasted ruins. But in

Afghanistan, though air power could destroy most of a

hostile force, it could not annihilate well-prepared defenses

outright. Nor could it defeat well-directed, skillfully

concealed assaults by itself. The result was a series of close

combat actions, rather than a war fought exclusively at

standoff ranges. And in these actions, even a few al Qaeda

survivors, properly motivated and armed with modern

automatic weapons, could mow down large numbers of

unsophisticated indigenous soldiers caught exposed in the

open. To survive long enough to take advantage of the

tremendous firepower leveled by American air support thus

still required the fundamental combat skills of cover,

concealment, dispersed small unit maneuver and local

suppressive fire. Novice troops without these fundamentals

either found themselves pinned down and unable to

advance or driven back with heavy losses. Better-skilled

troops able to advance under fire, on the other hand, found

the precision firepower of American air strikes to be a

decisive advantage. And where Afghan Taliban irresolution

or exposure left an undefended battlefield following

American air strikes, then even unskilled allies did indeed

prove able to occupy the abandoned ground.

The results thus suggest that where the troops on the

ground are comparable—either both skilled or both

unskilled—American precision fires can make the

difference. But where an unsophisticated ally is pitted

against an enemy with the skills and motivation to survive

precision engagement and fight back when attacked, then

poorly trained allies will be unable to take advantage of the

enormous potential that precision fires bring. Even with

precision air support, indigenous allies thus need a

42
combination of skill, motivation, and equipment at least

broadly comparable to their enemies’ to prevail.

A NEW EXPLANATION: THE AFGHAN CAMPAIGN

AS ORTHODOX THEATER WARFARE

Neither of the main views in the current debate is thus

wholly satisfactory. On the one hand, the campaign’s

idiosyncrasies were less decisive than often assumed. On

the other hand, the systematic lessons most commonly

drawn are at odds with the war’s actual conduct—the

fighting did not unfold as the Afghan Model supposes.

A more satisfactory accounting would be to view the

campaign neither as a fluke nor as a military revolution, but

rather as a surprisingly orthodox example of modern joint

theater warfare—albeit one with unusually heavy fire

support for ourselves and our allies. While the Afghan

campaign was unique in some respects and new in others, it

is easy to exaggerate the war’s distinctiveness. There were

important continuities between Afghanistan and prior

military experience—and these continuities were at least as

important for the campaign’s outcome as its differences.

The campaign, after all, centered on a struggle between

two sizeable armies. Although public attention has tended

to focus on the role of Western air power and the handful of

commandos who directed it, the purpose of that Western

role was to tip the scales in an ongoing, preexisting land

war. The Taliban and Northern Alliance forces whose

struggle this air power was meant to influence deployed

together some 60-80,000 troops (let alone the Southern

Alliance forces that arose as the fighting moved south).98

These troops were striving to take and hold ground in very

orthodox ways prior to the American intervention, and al

43

98 International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 2001-2002,

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 160, and references in note 30 above. By

comparison, Serbian forces in Kosovo numbered about 40,000 on the eve of the

1999 NATO air campaign: William Arkin, “Operation Allied Force: ‘The Most

Precise Application of Air Power in History,” in Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen,

eds., War Over Kosovo, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 1-37 at 14.
Qaeda continued to contest control of key geographic points

through the end of Operation ANACONDA in March.99 In

fact, American commanders were surprised by al Qaeda’s

willingness to stand their ground and fight for the

Shah-i-kot valley at ANACONDA; CJTF Mountain had

expected them to melt away in guerilla fashion once struck

rather than reinforcing a dug-in territorial defense-in-place

as they actually did.100 The campaign as a whole, moreover,

produced extensive close combat, the great majority of

which was waged by conventional infantry.

Of course, the outcome of this territorial struggle was

affected profoundly by SOF-directed precision air power—

this ultimately made the difference between stalemate and

victory. But it did not do so by itself. Tightly integrated

ground maneuver was necessary to exploit its effects once

the Coalition began to encounter chiefly foreign Taliban and

al Qaeda opponents with significant skill and motivation.

To overcome skilled, resolute opposition required both

precision fire and maneuver; neither alone was sufficient in

Afghanistan.

This, however, was hardly new. In fact, the necessary

synergy between fires and maneuver has been at the heart

of most great power military doctrines since at least 1918.

The history of modern tactics is largely a story of the

discovery of its importance in the crucible of the Western

Front and the subsequent spread of such methods across

nations and over time.101 The German tactical system that

first broke the Western trench stalemate in March 1918, for

example, was centered on new methods for integrating

suppressive fire and movement via dispersed formations

that used local terrain for cover.102 Allied armies had

learned similar lessons from hard experience in the

44

99 In fact, press commentaries in October were describing Taliban positions south of

Mazar-e-Sharif as resembling a First World War trench system: Peter Baker,

“Taliban Fortifies Capital for War,” Washington Post, October 4, 2001, p. A1.

100 “Operation Anaconda,” briefing slides, CJTF MTN G3; MHI: Tape 041902p, LTC

Briley int.

101 For more detailed treatments, see Biddle, “Land Warfare: Theory and Practice;”

House, Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century.
trenches and adopted similar methods by war’s end (albeit

with less complete implementation in the field).103 The

German tactics that wrought blitzkrieg in 1939-41 were

partly a matter of exploiting the tank’s new mobility, but

largely a product of a heavy emphasis on combining fire and

movement in balanced, combined arms formations.104

Germany’s opponents had allowed their skills in integrating

fire and maneuver to atrophy in the interwar years, but

under the pressure of hard fighting these skills were

gradually recovered, contributing centrally to the end of

blitzkrieg after 1941 and the gradual triumph of allied arms

by 1945.105 Israel’s success against poorly-trained Arab

infantry in 1956 and 1967 led them to de-emphasize

orthodox fire and maneuver in favor of an imbalanced stress

on the shock effect of mounted maneuver per se; they paid

for this imbalance with their heavy losses against

better-prepared Egyptian infantry in the Sinai in 1973.106

45

102 Timothy T. Lupfer, The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical

Doctrine During the First World War, Ft. Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies

Institute, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1981, Leavenworth

Paper No. 4, pp. 37-44; Bruce Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the

German Army, 1914-1918, New York: Praeger, 1989; English, On Infantry,

pp.18-22; Rod Paschall, The Defeat of Imperial Germany, 1917-1918, Chapel Hill,

NC: Algonquin Books, 1989, pp. 130-8.

103 Bidwell and Graham, Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War,

1904-1945, pp. 61-148; Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Western Front, pp. 84-191;

Paul Kennedy, “Britain in the First World War,” in Allan R. Millett and Williamson

Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. I, Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1988, pp.

31-79 at pp. 51, 69-70; Ian M. Brown, “Not Glamorous, But Effective: The Canadian

Corps and the Set-piece Attack, 1917-1918,” Journal of Military History 58, July

1994, pp. 421-44.

104 J.P. Harris, “The Myth of Blitzkrieg,” War in History, Vol. 2, No. 3, November,

1995, pp. 335-352; James S. Corum, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seeckt and

German Military Reform, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992; Manfred

Messerschmidt, “German Military Effectiveness Between 1919 and 1939,” in Allan

R. Millett and Williamson Murray, eds., Military Effectiveness, Vol. II, The

Interwar Period, Winchester, MA: Allen and Unwin, 1988, pp. 218-55; Matthew

Cooper, The German Army 1933-39: Its Political and Military Failure, London:

Macdonald and Jane’s, 1978, pp. 113-21.

105 Bidwell and Graham, Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War,

1904-1945, pp. 205-81; Peter Mansoor, The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of

American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,

1999; Michael Doubler, Closing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in

Europe, 1944-1945, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994; David Glantz and

Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed, Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1995.

106 Jonathan M. House, Toward Combined Arms Warfare: A Survey of Twentieth

Century Tactics, Doctrine, and Organization, Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army
American doctrinal writers initially responded to the

Israelis’ 1973 experience by substituting a one-sided

emphasis on anti-tank fires for the Israelis’ converse

overemphasis on maneuver; by 1982 this imbalance was

remedied by a return to orthodox fire-maneuver synergy in

the new doctrine of AirLand Battle.107

Nor was it new that the fires and the maneuver were

provided by different nations in Afghanistan. In Vietnam,

our late-war, post-withdrawal policy was precisely to

support a South Vietnamese proxy with American air

power, much as we did with our AMF proxies in

Afghanistan. Of course, the ultimate outcome was much

more favorable in Afghanistan. In part, this is due to air

power’s greater lethality in 2001-02. But the difference is

also due in part to the different balance of maneuver skills

on the ground in these two conflicts. In Afghanistan, our

proxies were generally a match for their enemies tactically,

and in key battles like Bai Beche they were able to integrate

their maneuver closely with our fires. In Vietnam, by

contrast, the southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam

(ARVN) was generally less skilled and motivated than its

northern foes—and American air support was correspondingly less decisive.108

As in Afghanistan, however, there were exceptions to the

general rule in Vietnam, too, and these exceptions offer

some instructive parallels. In the 1972 Easter Offensive, for

46

Combat Studies Institute, 1984, pp. 172-80; Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham

R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, Vol. I, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990, pp.

14-116; Chaim Herzog,The War of Atonement, October 1973, Boston: Little, Brown,

1975; George W. Gawrych, “The Egyptian High Command in the 1973 War,” Armed

Forces and Society, Vol. 13, No. 4, Summer 1987.

107 Robert Doughty, The Evolution of U.S. Army Tactical Doctrine, 1946-76, Ft.

Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, 1979, Leavenworth Paper

No. 1, pp. 40-46; John L. Romjue, From Active Defense to AirLand Battle: The

Development of Army Doctrine, 1973-1982, Ft. Monroe, VA: Historical Office, U.S.

Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1984; Paul Herbert, Deciding What Has to

be Done: General William E. DePuy and the 1976 Edition of FM 100-5, Operations,

Ft. Leavenworth KS: U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute, 1988, Leavenworth

Paper No. 16.

108 On tactical skill in the ARVN and PAVN (People’s Army of Vietnam—the North

Vietnamese army), see, e.g., George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The

United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, New York: McGraw Hill, 1996 ed., pp.

233-4, 265-6.
example, North Vietnamese attackers who had previously

waged a mostly guerrilla war were thrown into a

conventional, large-unit armored assault. With little

experience in such tactics, they had great difficulty

combining arms, coordinating attacks, or exploiting terrain

for cover. American air power thus found massed, exposed

targets in the open and inflicted heavy losses, enabling our

ARVN proxies to contain the offensive.109 By contrast, in the

South Vietnamese Lam Son 719 offensive in February 1971

it was the ARVN which found itself in an unaccustomed

role, launching its first major airmobile assault without

American advisors (who were forbidden to accompany them

to their objectives in Laos); the North Vietnamese were here

implementing very familiar tactics, waging just the sort of

conventional defense they had practiced in more than a

decade of continuous warfare against American and French

attackers. American air strikes here enabled the ARVN to

get as far as the Laotian village of Tchepone, but ARVN

maneuver skills left much to be desired and losses were

correspondingly heavy; the ensuing ARVN withdrawal left

much of their equipment behind and proved so harrowing

that no similar offensive was ever again attempted.110

These actions from the early 1970s were actually much

47

109 See, e.g., Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam, New York: Oxford University Press,

1978, pp. 196-201; G.H. Turley, The Easter Offensive: Vietnam, 1972, Novato,

Calif.: Presidio Press, 1985; Robert Pape, Bombing to Win, Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1996, pp. 194-205. Note that in Lam Son 719, as in many other

20th century battlefields, even heavy firepower was not sufficient to annihilate

properly prepared defensive positions. One American helicopter pilot in the battle,

for example, reports that he flew through the dust cloud of a B-52 strike against

North Vietnamese defenses, yet took small arms fire from surviving defenders in

the bombed area: personal communication, COL Douglas Lovelace, USA, ret’d.,

Carlisle PA, October 7, 2002.

110 Dave Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet, San Rafael, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1978,

pp. 238-43; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History, New York: Viking, 1983, pp.

628-31; House, Toward Combined Arms Warfare, pp. 164-68. The comparison, of

course, is imperfect: success in 1972 could also be attributed to air power’s greater

efficacy against tactical attackers, and the mixed results of 1971 could be

attributed to air power’s lesser efficacy against dug-in defenders, rather than the

variance in relative tactical skills I note above. To distinguish these competing

effects would require additional cases, which are unavailable. My purpose here,

however, is not to explain the relative importance of mission and skill in Vietnam,

but merely to demonstrate that a pattern of American air support succeeding when

the supported proxy is a match for its enemy’s skills but not otherwise is not wholly

unprecedented.
more like Afghanistan than many now suppose: where our

Afghan allies met opponents with superior tactical skills,

even lavish, radically-precise air support proved insufficient; where they met their enemies with something like

equal skills and motivation, American firepower made all

the difference.

By contrast, many now believe that in Afghanistan we

turned a ragtag militia into conquerors who subsequently

overwhelmed a superior enemy by simply walking forward

in the wake of our precision bombing. This belief is largely

responsible for the general perception of military revolution

in Afghanistan—and if the war had really been fought this

way, then the perception would be right. But the war was

not actually fought this way. And what did happen was

much closer to the long-standing historical precedent on the

need for integrating fire and maneuver to overcome skilled,

resolute opponents.

Of course, this is not to suggest that nothing has changed

since 1918. In particular, the form that fire support has

taken has changed dramatically since then—and the

increases in firepower’s range, precision, round-for-round

lethality, responsiveness, and flexibility have obviously

been dramatic in recent years. In a sense, these changes

have been revolutionary if considered chiefly in terms of

their effect on the way fires have been provided.

Moreover, the increasing lethality of standoff precision

engagement has made the combination of fire and

movement much more powerful where both elements are

present. Tight integration of JDAMs or laser-guided bombs

with skilled ground maneuver is far more effective today

than were 77 mm field guns and German stosstruppen in

1918. This is an important development and has greatly

increased the real military power of the United States today

relative to any plausible foe.111

48

111 For more detailed discussions of the effects of technological change on the relative

capability of skilled and unskilled ground forces, see Biddle, “The Past as

Prologue.”
But what new technology has not done is to enable us to

succeed using either fire or maneuver alone. The Afghan

campaign—like the Western Front in World War I, the

invasions of France, Poland, or Russia in 1939-41, the

Northwest European campaign of 1944-45, the Mideast

Wars of 1956-1982, or any of dozens of other, similar

examples—was a joint air-land struggle in which the ability

to combine fire and maneuver by diverse arms made the

difference between success and failure. Seen in this larger

context of the underlying determinants of campaign

outcomes in modern warfare, this continuity in the need for

a demanding system of integrated fire and maneuver is at

least as significant for the future of warfare—and for the

policy decisions that turn on this—as the accompanying

changes in the technology of precision firepower.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

It is thus a mistake to see Afghanistan as a radical break

with prior military experience. As in any war, it brought

continuity as well as change—and the continuity was

crucial both for understanding the campaign’s outcome and

for projecting its policy implications. This view of

Afghanistan as continuity in turn implies a different

perspective than either of those now current in the debate

on the war.

Perhaps most fundamentally, it suggests that

Afghanistan was neither a revolution nor a fluke. The

Afghan Model will not always work as it did in Afghanistan,

because we will not always enjoy allies who match up so well

against their enemies. But where we do, we can reasonably

expect the Model to be roughly as lethal as it was last fall

and winter. The Model is thus at once oversold by its

proponents and undersold by its detractors: it can work

under some important preconditions, but those preconditions will not always be present.

49
This in turn implies some very different directions for

U.S. policy than many of those now current in the debate on

Afghanistan.

Implications for Force Structure and the Design

of the American Military.

Many now see the Afghan campaign as evidence that the

American military can be redesigned to emphasize

long-range precision engagement at the expense of close

combat capability.112 If the Afghan Model can do

everywhere what it did in Afghanistan, it would make sense

to restructure our forces to reduce dramatically the ground

forces that make up such a large fraction of today’s military,

and shift toward a much greater reliance on standoff

precision engagement forces and the SOF teams needed to

direct their fires.

This argument is not completely without merit. In fact, it

will be possible—sometimes—to repeat the new Model’s

Afghan performance. In Korea, for example, many analysts

believe our South Korean allies could provide at least the

match for their enemy’s skills that the AMF did for the

Taliban, and this would suggest that large U.S. ground

forces may be less necessary for the defense of the peninsula

than often supposed.113

It would be dangerous to assume, however, that such

allies will always be available. In a world of diverse military

organizations, we will sometimes enjoy allies who can

50

112 See references in note 4.

113 Note, however, that this does not necessarily imply a U.S. ground force withdrawal

from South Korea as the appropriate policy. Whatever their military utility,

American ground forces serve a variety of political and diplomatic purposes, and a

withdrawal from South Korea would send international political signals that the

United States might not wish to send. Moreover, the proximity of key objectives

like Seoul to the border may require larger forces for their defense than would be

needed in theaters without such outlying resources. Either way, though, the South

Korean army demonstrates that indigenous allies do sometimes exist with the

skills for the Afghan Model to perform as it did in Afghanistan. On the South

Korean army, see, e.g., Michael O’Hanlon, “Stopping a North Korean Invasion:

Why Defending South Korea is Easier than the Pentagon Thinks,” International

Security, Vol. 22, No. 4, Spring 1998, pp. 135-70.
match our enemies but sometimes we will not. And where

we do not, the Afghan experience offers little reason to

expect the new Model to prevail.

This in turn suggests that an unbalanced U.S. military

dependent on standoff precision engagement would be a

high-risk posture. At times it would succeed; at others it

would fail badly. A balanced, all-arms force structure with

the ability to integrate precision fires with skilled American

ground maneuver thus reduces risk and offers important

leverage in a world where we cannot know exactly where or

with whom we may be forced to fight.

Of course, to argue that America must retain a balanced

force is not to show that any given ground force size or

composition is necessary: how much of a shift away from

today’s structure could be safely accommodated? No study

of Afghanistan per se can answer such a question—it clearly

turns on a variety of considerations much larger than the

conduct of this specific conflict. But the discussion above

does provide a number of important insights that must be

reflected in any adequate analysis of American force

structure at large.

Most important, this monograph suggests that standard

assessments based largely on mounted or aerial warfare

against exposed armored targets are dangerously

misleading. Almost all major force structure analyses are

now built around the use of formal computer models whose

ability to represent dismounted warfare against dispersed,

covered, concealed targets in complex terrain is very

limited. For over 40 years, the analytical community has

focused on an expected conflict between massed armored

forces operating mostly in the open. The corpus of models

and other tools that emerged from this effort reflect this

focus and treat warfare mainly as a problem of interactions

among armored vehicles and major weapon systems. The

role of dismounted soldiers has been largely ignored,

whether on the attack or the defense, or in simple terrain or

complex. Whether this has ever been an adequate

51
treatment of real combat can be debated. But it is clearly at

odds with the kind of warfare practiced in Afghanistan last

fall and winter. The Taliban briefly presented just the kinds

of static, exposed, point targets that current models assume,

but quickly discovered that such postures are suicidal in the

face of American air power. They then dispersed into

covered and concealed positions—both in the defense and

the attack—and conducted most of the campaign in a style

of fighting very different from that assumed in today’s

standard analytical tools. This was not guerrilla warfare (at

least, not in the major actions through the fall of Kandahar

and the end of Operation ANACONDA): the Taliban sought

to hold ground and deny access to key cities and other

strategic objectives. But they did so from fighting positions

intended to avoid exposure through cover and concealment,

and these positions succeeded in evading discovery or

destruction long enough to thwart initial advances by AMF

ground forces on multiple occasions. We can expect most

future opponents to try to fight much the same way—it is

the traditional response of armies to high-firepower

opposition. Warfare against dismounted, covered,

concealed, and dispersed targets will thus be the norm for

American arms in the future. To assess military

requirements using tools that cannot address such combat

is to reach findings that are meaningless at best, and

dangerous at worst.

The effects of this error, moreover, are not unbiased:

other things being equal, mistaking a war of dismounted

cover and concealment for one of exposed armored battles

will underestimate the American forces needed. This is

because such an error mistakenly assumes the type of

warfare we do best. The American military is extremely

adept at destroying massed, exposed targets in the open,

and this is precisely why the Taliban abandoned such

postures: they realized they would fare much better if they

avoided exposure. To calculate the force size needed to

destroy a given fraction of an enemy’s exposed, massed

major weapon systems is thus to underestimate the

52
difficulty of the real military problem to be faced against

enemies who avoid such tactics, and hence such a

calculation will underestimate the size or strength of the

forces needed to solve it. Of course there are many

assumptions needed to model any given campaign, and one

could easily make many of them in ways that would either

over- or under-estimate final force requirements. This in

turn means that any given study could exaggerate, as well

as underestimate, our needs: the effects of overestimating

the enemy’s will to fight or military skills, for example, could

more than compensate for errors in projecting their posture.

But among the more important inherent, built-in

assumptions on which current models are built is the

assumption of massed armored warfare—and the analysis

of Afghanistan above suggests that this assumption’s

marginal effect on the typical model-based study will be to

reduce artificially the study’s findings for U.S. force

requirements. To reach sound conclusions as to the needed

size of the American military, one must thus take this

problem into account in a systematic way.

Implications for American Foreign Policy

and the Conduct of the Ongoing War.

Among the most serious potential errors stemming from

a misreading of the Afghan campaign would be to

underestimate the costs of future American military action.

If Afghanistan were evidence of a new American way of war

that could defeat enemies quickly and cheaply, with little

U.S. casualty exposure and a limited U.S. political footprint,

then a neo-imperial foreign policy underwritten by frequent

American military intervention would seem attractive to

many. Similarly, it would make intervention in any given

theater in the ongoing war on terrorism seem more

attractive by reducing the expected costs.

Here, too, there will be times when optimistic

expectations can be met. Where we enjoy indigenous allies

with the necessary skills and commitment, the costs to

53
America of intervention may well be no higher than those of

last fall and winter. We cannot, however, assume this for all

cases. For a neo-imperialist policy to make sense, one must

therefore be willing to pay real costs in at least some

important theaters.

One such theater is Iraq, the focus of perhaps the most

pressing immediate decision confronting the conduct of the

ongoing war. Would our potential allies in Iraq be good

enough for the Afghan Model to succeed? The Iraqi military

our proxies would face is hardly among the world’s most

skilled or resolute. At most, one might consider them

semi-skilled and variably motivated.114 Our potential allies,

on the other hand, are demonstrably worse. The Kurds have

shown themselves in multiple actions against Saddam’s

Republican Guard to be even less adept than the Iraqis.115

The Iraqi National Congress (INC) has no military yet at all,

whether skilled or not. Given the time and the space,

American special operations forces could in principle

provide the needed skills by training the indigenous forces,

but it is far from clear that either the time or the space is

available. In Afghanistan, current estimates allow up to five

years to raise and train an Afghan national army.116 If

raising and training an INC army would take anywhere

near this long, it would pose serious policy problems—not

least of which being the time it would give Saddam to

further his WMD program. After all, the President now

argues for prompt regime change in Iraq on the grounds

that to delay would risk allowing Saddam to complete a

nuclear weapon. In the meantime, Saddam would have

every incentive to attack any sanctuary we might use rather

than waiting for us to complete the training; even if he

54

114 See, e.g., Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood,” pp. 139-179 at 158-61; James Pardew,

“The Iraqi Army’s Defeat in Kuwait,” Parameters, Winter 1991-92, pp. 17-23;

Murray Hammick, “Iraqi Obstacles and Defensive Positions,” International

Defense Review, September 1991, pp. 989-991.

115 See, for example, International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey,

1991-1992, London: Brassey’s, 1992, pp. 94-98; idem, Strategic Survey 1996/97,

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 154-7.

116 John F. Burns, “Gratitude and Doubt in New Life of Afghans,” New York Times,

September 11, 2002.
withheld chemical or biological weapons, it is not clear that

we could defend the sanctuary from a determined

conventional attack without a trained ground force in place.

A Kurdish army might be quicker to train than an INC

force, but reliance on Kurdish allies would pose diplomatic

difficulties for U.S.-Turkish relations, and we would still

have to defend the training sanctuary against potentially

determined attack in the meantime. For the Afghan Model

to perform the way it did in Afghanistan requires

adequately skilled ground forces; barring substantial

retraining of either Kurdish or INC armies, these ground

troops would have to be some combination of our own and

allies’ such as Britain’s.

Of course, it is entirely possible that Saddam’s forces

might quit without a fight; many did so in 1991, and the

Iraqis are weaker now than they were then. But it is worth

recalling that not all of Saddam’s legions gave in without

fighting in 1991: the Republican Guard, by contrast with

Iraq’s regular conscript infantry, fought back when struck

by Coalition ground forces.117 They fought poorly, and even

in the Guard, combat motivation was hardly fanatical. Yet

Saddam’s best troops did not simply quit in 1991. Modern

autocrats invest heavily in promoting the loyalty and

political reliability of their praetorian guards, and in tying

their fate to that of the regime they serve.118 In 1991 this

sufficed to keep some Iraqis in the field, risking their lives

for the regime until the battle was demonstrably lost. In

2002 it is possible that the Guard might choose

otherwise—but maybe not. To invade without sufficient

ground forces on the assumption that there will be no

fighting to be done would thus be a major gamble.

55

117 Biddle, “Victory Misunderstood” at pp. 149-52.

118 See, e.g., Steven David, Third World Coups D’Etat and International Security,

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; Amos Perlmutter and Valerie

Plave Bennett, eds., The Political Influence of the Military, New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1980, pp. 205-208; Eliot Cohen, “Distant Battles: Modern War in

the Third World,” International Security, Vol. 10, No. 4, Spring 1986, pp. 143-171.
Implications for Army Transformation.

The analysis above suggests that Afghanistan does not

imply a wholesale restructuring of the American military—

but this does not mean everything should stay the same.

The Army is transforming, and will continue to do so; as it

does, it is important to pay special attention to the kinds of

targets encountered in Operation ANACONDA and

increasingly from the Afghan campaign’s earliest days:

dispersed, dismounted, covered, and concealed.

To cope with such targets requires aggressive, realistic

training and a combination of arms—including effective,

plentiful precision engagement systems. But among the

essential requirements for such warfare is an ample supply

of highly skilled dismounted infantry. And the relative

proportion of this infantry to accompanying mounted

elements is likely to have to increase over time. Ever-morelethal precision engagement technology is driving our

opponents increasingly into cover and increasingly into

complex terrain—and these are the postures that demand

the largest proportion of dismounted strength in the

American combined arms mix. Hence the demand for

dismounted infantry in Army combat units is likely to rise

over time.

By contrast, many visions of the future Army would

leave the Service without sufficient dismounted strength for

this kind of warfare. Some, for example, now propose

designs for ground forces centered on mounted warfare at

standoff range, using new information and precision

engagement technologies to destroy opponents at a distance

without exposing Americans to risky close combat and thus

without the need for large numbers of expensive, laborintensive dismounts. Beliefs that the American public is too

casualty-averse to tolerate battlefield losses drive force

planners to de-emphasize the role of vulnerable,

thin-skinned, dismounted infantry in favor of highertechnology approaches that substitute capital-intensive

remote surveillance and precision firepower for labor56
intensive close combat. Interpretations of the Afghan

experience that see our success there as the result of

precision engagement systems breaking hostile formations

at standoff ranges give powerful impetus to such proposals.

These interpretations, however, are fundamentally

flawed. Ground forces’ unique contribution to warfare of the

kind seen in Afghanistan is their ability to cope with targets

who reduce their exposure to deep attack by dismounting,

dispersing, covering, and concealing themselves. And this

unique ground force contribution resides in dismount-led

combined arms forces for close combat in potentially

complex terrain. These may be expensive, they may be

labor-intensive, and they may pose casualty risks—but if we

care about mission effectiveness against the kinds of targets

we encountered in Afghanistan and will likely encounter in

the future, then we must accept those costs and design the

force to be effective, not just inexpensive, against the kinds

of enemies it is increasingly likely to face.119

Precision engagement offers tremendous capability—

but only if we exploit its effects via tight integration with

ground maneuver. And increasingly, if Afghanistan is any

guide, the kind of maneuver we will need will include a

heavy dose of dismounted, labor-intensive, close quarters

fighting.

As a whole, then, we should be wary of claims that

Afghanistan represents a revolution in warfare with the

potential to motivate sweeping changes in American

defense policy and the structure of the American military.

Of course, there is much that a study of a single conflict

cannot prove about the future; perhaps Afghanistan will be

unrepresentative of the emerging challenges the American

military will face in years to come. Yet many of the claims for

57

119 For other arguments that Army dismounted strength may have to increase in the

future, see, e.g., Robert B. Killebrew, “Reinventing the Army for the 21st Century,”

Army, Vol. 50, No. 6, June 2000, pp. 12-18; idem, “Toward an Adaptive Army,”

Army, Vol. 52, No. 1, January 2002, pp. 21-26; idem, “Deterrence with a

Vengeance,” Armed Forces Journal International, Vol. 136, No. 3, October 1998,

pp. 76-81; Frederick J. Kroesen, “The Future of Land Warfare: An Opinion,” Army,

Vol. 52, No. 6, June 2002, pp. 10-13.
Afghanistan’s uniqueness bear less weight than one might

easily have supposed. Even if it cannot provide complete

answers, this conflict does offer important lessons about the

future. And perhaps the most important of these lessons is

that warfare’s future may have more in common with its

past than many in the current debate would have us believe.

58
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General Robert R. Ivany

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.

Director of Research

Dr. Steven Metz

Author

Dr. Stephen Biddle

Director of Publications

Ms. Marianne P. Cowling

Publications Assistant

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

*****

Composition

Ms. Kimberly A. Rockwell