Come this fall, there will be a new and extremely powerful supercomputer in Afghanistan. But it won’t be in Dave Petraeus’ headquarters in Kabul or at some three-letter agency’s operations center in Kandahar. It’ll be floating 20,000 feet above the warzone, aboard a giant spy blimp that watches and listens to everything for miles around. ...
The idea behind the Blue Devil is to have up to a dozen different sensors, all flying on the same airship and talking to each other constantly. The supercomputer will crunch the data, and automatically slew the sensors in the right direction: pointing a camera at, say, the guy yapping about an upcoming ambush.
The goal is to get that coordinated information down to ground troops in less than 15 seconds.
Already the enemy is reluctant to face our troops in battle because we wax them in any firefight (and increasingly, Afghan troops are well enough trained to inspire the same reluctance). The enemy is forced to fight us with robots and not face us directly. This Times article portrays the reliance on IEDs as a sign of clever strategy as our troops endure heavy casualties from them:
That is in part because the Taliban fighters here are well trained and battle-hardened, and many American units face daily firefights. But the insurgents’ bombs have been even worse than their bullets, and every move the Marines make now must come slowly, deliberately. Clustered tightly on trails, each one taking care to step in the footprints of the man before him, the Marines squint at every bump in the dirt in case it hides an improvised explosive device.
The way they have been forced to adapt highlights the intense challenges that Americans face as they try to root out an enemy that knows the terrain, can find support and shelter in many villages, and is patient enough to let booby traps do most of the fighting.
Wrong. While our troops certainly face the stress of an unseen enemy laying mines, that reliance on mines is not a matter of superior patience, training, or being battle hardened. It is a matter of the enemy being unable to drive our forces out directly. Massing to defeat us is the only way to drive us out. Mines can only delay us and hope to sap our will to win. This failed in Iraq and it will fail in Afghanistan, if the only issue is how our troops deal with the threat.
One way to win is to take advantage of the fact that it is too dangerous for the enemy to mass troops to fight us. We are taking advantage by organizing local defense forces:
The Afghan government has organized more than 2,000 villagers into armed local defense forces so they can keep out insurgents and support coalition and Afghan forces.
The self-defense groups are part of an expanding U.S.-backed program that bears a resemblance to a similar tactic in Iraq that proved successful.
In Afghanistan, the program has helped protect villages from insurgent attacks and the plan could expand to up to 10,000 people, Interior Ministry spokesman Zemarai Bashary said. If the plan proves successful it could grow even larger, he said.
These local defense forces can work when the enemy can't mass forces to overwhelm the local defense forces. Taliban IEDs can only stiffen the resolve of Afghans killed by those indiscriminate killers without threatening to demoralize the Afghan local defense forces by defeating them. The enemy, as the Times article should highlight, have become atomized. This can lead to victory in Afghanistan just as it did in Iraq.
And this helps the local defense forces not officially sponsored and so off the radar of analysts who study force ratios.
Why people over here are prone to panic over the war in Afghanistan is beyond me. The Taliban aren't "resurgent." They're getting their asses kicked.
