Basenshukai
08-28-2004, 12:25
NOTE: The following reflects the opinions of the author alone and does not reflect the opinions of anyone in the Department of Defense, Department of the Army, or anyone working for the US Government in any official capacity. All the names and locations have been changed, or modified, for security reasons.
€œ€ TO THRIVE IN AMBIGUOUS ENVIRONMENTS €€
Time: 1835 (Local); 2335 (Zulu)
Place: Base camp somewhere in one of the largest cocaine producing areas in South America
I was sitting in our operations center reading the latest intelligence updates when Kirk, our sole medical sergeant in the detachment, halfway opened the team house door and scanned the interior until he saw me. "Sir", he said as I raised my eyes from the one-inch stack of paper, €œ€ we are having a problem with the Host Nation (HN) guys “ you better come see this." We were training in a base camp that served as a special operations school for the HN army. The camp is a carbon copy of a Vietnam-style firebase. There are concentric circles of defense that included an anti-tank ditch, barbed wire, anti-personnel mines and clear fields of fire for inter-locking machinegun fire from numerous bunkers. There is a heavily reinforced communications bunker and a helicopter-landing zone (HLZ). There were also several administrative buildings and even an NCO / Officer club. The backside of the base camp rested on a major riverbank and the HN naval infantry forces covered that area. Numerous 60, 81, and 120 mm mortars also protected the large base camp.
Our mission was to train a conventional light infantry organization using the special operations school as our base of operations. This was an uneasy marriage for the HN force commanders. Their military is replete with parochialism and inter-service rivalries. Our Pre-Deployment Site Survey (PDSS) had identified this issue long before our deployment. It was not a good idea to place a poorly equipped, minimally trained HN conventional unit within the confines of a specially selected, specially trained, and well equipped HN force that views the other with institutionally bred disdain and elitism. The base camp commander was only grudgingly supporting the idea of lodging a US Army Special Forces team who was to train anyone else but his own elite soldiers (elite being a relative term, of course). Also, there was the problem of deconflicting the use of ranges and training areas. The function of the school is to train their special forces and not some conventional unit. The US Embassy insisted on our presence in the area, however, and we made the best of it. The team sergeant aggressively developed and pursued a challenging training program while I worked the military politics between adversarial HN senior officers. The rest of the men executed the plan.
The base camp commander placed many restrictions to our movement in the area. We essentially bent, or broke most of the restrictions. We didn€™t do it to spite them, or to stir further controversy, but to be able to complete our mission. The most critical rule €“ one that we took very seriously €“ was the restriction of movement on, or off the base camp to the hours between 0600 and 1800 hours. The reason for the time restriction is security. The area was only recently liberated from leftist guerrilla control. Interestingly, this control was wrested away not by national army forces, but by a rival right wing insurgent group. Thus, the area is still considered a high risk and we certainly treated it that way. The control of the area is pivotal towards the ownership of the lucrative cocaine production in this region. In other respects, control of the area is also symbolic of dominance in this large section of the country.
Initially, the HN base camp commander wanted to be consulted before the detachment moved anywhere, or executed any training. He wanted to know how many men from the detachment where in the base camp and wanted to be the approving authority for any movement we made on, or off of his camp €“ at any time. He wanted control of the storage of our ammunition and our vehicles. If we left the vehicles in his camp, he wanted the keys. He did this with a SEAL team that had been training the naval infantry near the river north of the base camp. When they left for a while, they handed him the keys to their SUVs. Weeks later it was found out that the SUVs were being used as personal vehicles for the HN officers. The SEALs quickly recovered their keys and passed this lesson on to any other American commandos that trained in the area.
(to be continued)
€œ€ TO THRIVE IN AMBIGUOUS ENVIRONMENTS €€
Time: 1835 (Local); 2335 (Zulu)
Place: Base camp somewhere in one of the largest cocaine producing areas in South America
I was sitting in our operations center reading the latest intelligence updates when Kirk, our sole medical sergeant in the detachment, halfway opened the team house door and scanned the interior until he saw me. "Sir", he said as I raised my eyes from the one-inch stack of paper, €œ€ we are having a problem with the Host Nation (HN) guys “ you better come see this." We were training in a base camp that served as a special operations school for the HN army. The camp is a carbon copy of a Vietnam-style firebase. There are concentric circles of defense that included an anti-tank ditch, barbed wire, anti-personnel mines and clear fields of fire for inter-locking machinegun fire from numerous bunkers. There is a heavily reinforced communications bunker and a helicopter-landing zone (HLZ). There were also several administrative buildings and even an NCO / Officer club. The backside of the base camp rested on a major riverbank and the HN naval infantry forces covered that area. Numerous 60, 81, and 120 mm mortars also protected the large base camp.
Our mission was to train a conventional light infantry organization using the special operations school as our base of operations. This was an uneasy marriage for the HN force commanders. Their military is replete with parochialism and inter-service rivalries. Our Pre-Deployment Site Survey (PDSS) had identified this issue long before our deployment. It was not a good idea to place a poorly equipped, minimally trained HN conventional unit within the confines of a specially selected, specially trained, and well equipped HN force that views the other with institutionally bred disdain and elitism. The base camp commander was only grudgingly supporting the idea of lodging a US Army Special Forces team who was to train anyone else but his own elite soldiers (elite being a relative term, of course). Also, there was the problem of deconflicting the use of ranges and training areas. The function of the school is to train their special forces and not some conventional unit. The US Embassy insisted on our presence in the area, however, and we made the best of it. The team sergeant aggressively developed and pursued a challenging training program while I worked the military politics between adversarial HN senior officers. The rest of the men executed the plan.
The base camp commander placed many restrictions to our movement in the area. We essentially bent, or broke most of the restrictions. We didn€™t do it to spite them, or to stir further controversy, but to be able to complete our mission. The most critical rule €“ one that we took very seriously €“ was the restriction of movement on, or off the base camp to the hours between 0600 and 1800 hours. The reason for the time restriction is security. The area was only recently liberated from leftist guerrilla control. Interestingly, this control was wrested away not by national army forces, but by a rival right wing insurgent group. Thus, the area is still considered a high risk and we certainly treated it that way. The control of the area is pivotal towards the ownership of the lucrative cocaine production in this region. In other respects, control of the area is also symbolic of dominance in this large section of the country.
Initially, the HN base camp commander wanted to be consulted before the detachment moved anywhere, or executed any training. He wanted to know how many men from the detachment where in the base camp and wanted to be the approving authority for any movement we made on, or off of his camp €“ at any time. He wanted control of the storage of our ammunition and our vehicles. If we left the vehicles in his camp, he wanted the keys. He did this with a SEAL team that had been training the naval infantry near the river north of the base camp. When they left for a while, they handed him the keys to their SUVs. Weeks later it was found out that the SUVs were being used as personal vehicles for the HN officers. The SEALs quickly recovered their keys and passed this lesson on to any other American commandos that trained in the area.
(to be continued)