Tag: war in afghanistan
Communication Errors Cited In Friendly-Fire Deaths In Afghanistan

Communication Errors Cited In Friendly-Fire Deaths In Afghanistan

By W.J. Hennigan, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Communication errors by troops on the ground and in the air led to the deaths of five American soldiers and one Afghan during a June battle with insurgents in southern Afghanistan, a Pentagon investigation concluded in a report released Thursday.

In one of the deadliest friendly-fire incidents of the nearly 13-year war, soldiers failed to follow established procedures for relaying their position to an aircraft flying over them, the U.S. Central Command found. Nor did the crew of the Air Force B-1 bomber follow required steps to ensure it knew where ground troops were before releasing a pair of bombs that hit their position.

“Though this was a challenging set of circumstances, had the team executed standard tactics, techniques, and procedures and communicated effectively, this tragic incident was avoidable,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian said in the nearly 300-page report, which was partially redacted before its release under the Freedom of Information Act.

“The key members executing the close air-support mission collectively failed to effectively execute the fundamentals, which resulted in poor situational awareness and improper target identification,” he said.

Few details of the June 9 incident were released at the time, as coalition officials notified soldiers’ families and investigators tried to determine what happened.

The fateful operation, led by Afghans with support from U.S. special forces, was intended to disrupt insurgents and improve security for polling stations before Afghanistan’s presidential runoff election.

The troops came under fire about 7:30 p.m. as they prepared to return to base. They climbed to a ridgeline to gain an advantage against the insurgents who were shooting at them.

But the soldiers did not properly communicate their position to the B-1 bomber crew, which was flying at an altitude of about 12,000 feet providing “close air support,” the report says. Aircrew members mistook muzzle flashes from the U.S. troops on the ridgeline as insurgent fire.

One of the soldiers, Staff Sgt. Scott R. Studenmund, 24, of Pasadena, California, had an infrared strobe light affixed to the back of his helmet, which was intended to notify friendly forces of their location. The strobe cannot be seen by the naked eye but can be detected by a heat-seeking sensor.

The sensor pods on the B-1 aren’t capable of detecting the infrared strobes, however, and the pilots’ night-vision glasses can detect strobes only at limited ranges, the report says.

The B-1 targeted the ridgeline and dropped two bombs, killing all the soldiers: Studenmund; Staff Sgt. Jason A. McDonald, 28, of Butler, Georgia.; Spc. Justin R. Helton, 25, of Beaver, Ohio; Cpl. Justin R. Clouse, 22, of Sprague, Washington; Pvt. Aaron S. Toppen, 19, of Mokena, Illinois; and Afghan Sgt. Gulbuddin Ghulam Sakhi.

About 30,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, most of whom are special forces who still conduct regular ground operations in the area of the deadly incident. The Pentagon plans to have just 9,800 troops there by the beginning of 2015.

AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski

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Gates: Obama Didn’t Believe His Own War Strategy

Gates: Obama Didn’t Believe His Own War Strategy

Washington (AFP) – Former defense secretary Robert Gates has delivered a scathing critique of President Barack Obama’s handling of the war in Afghanistan in a revealing new memoir, the media reported.

In “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary of War,” Gates recounts how Obama appeared to lack faith in a war strategy he had approved and in the commander he named to lead it, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post. He said the president also did not like Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

“As I sat there, I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy and doesn’t consider the war to be his,” Gates writes of a March 2011 meeting in the White House.

“For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Having approved deploying more than 30,000 forces after an acrimonious White House debate, the U.S. president seemed plagued by doubts and surrounded by civilian aides who sowed distrust with the military, Gates writes.

Obama was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in the memoir, which is due to be released on January 14.

In contrast to his subdued, even-keeled public demeanor as Pentagon chief, Gates strikes a sometimes bitter tone in his memoir.

The former CIA director whose career dates back to the Nixon administration voices frustration at the “controlling nature” of Obama’s White House, which he says constantly interfered in Pentagon affairs, even though civilian aides lacked an understanding of military operations.

The White House national security staff “took micromanagement and operational meddling to a new level,” he writes, comparing the approach to the 1970s Nixon era.

“All too early in the administration,” Gates writes, “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers by senior White House officials — including the president and vice president — became a big problem for me as I tried to manage the relationship between the commander-in-chief and his military leaders.”

After a tense meeting on Afghanistan in September 2009, Gates says he came close to resigning because he was “deeply uneasy with the Obama White House’s lack of appreciation — from the top down — of the uncertainties and unpredictability of war.”

A statement from National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden later defended Obama’s record on Afghanistan.

“It is well known that the president has been committed to achieving the mission of disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al-Qaeda, while also ensuring that we have a clear plan for winding down the war,” she said.

Hayden also hit back at Gates’s assertion that Vice President Joe Biden had been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

“The president disagrees with secretary Gates’s assessment… Joe Biden has been one of the leading statesmen of his time and has helped advance America’s leadership in the world,” she said.

A White House official separately defended Obama’s record on both Afghanistan and Iraq.

“It’s well known that as a matter of principle and sound policy, President Obama opposed going to war in the first place, opposed the surge of forces and then ended the war in Iraq as president. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong,” the official said.

On Afghanistan, the official said Obama “has always been firmly committed to the strategy that secretary Gates helped designed and that our troops have so ably carried out in Afghanistan, while also insisting that we have a clear plan to wind down the war.”

Gates, however, gives credit to Obama for approving the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, which he himself initially opposed.

It was “one of the most courageous decisions I had ever witnessed in the White House,” the former Pentagon chief writes.

Although Gates heaps praise on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, he is stunned by an exchange between Obama and Clinton in which the two openly admitted they opposed a troop surge in Iraq in 2007 for purely political reasons.

“To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying,” he says.

Gates helped oversee the deployment of additional troops to Iraq during the Bush administration.

A Republican, Gates served under ex-president George W. Bush and was asked to stay on at the Pentagon for two years after Obama entered office.