Moving the Rhod. Fire Force concept to Afghanistan?

[JMA]

I can think of a bevy of reasons. BH Liddell Hart frequently presented false or misconstrued historical data to back up his own belief on how things work. Perhaps these authors want to prove that their argument that "fireforce tactics are more effective than conventional COIN tactics".

The difference is though that Liddel-Hart was allegedly doing it to enhance his own personal reputation. (Like his alleged prompting of German gen
influenced by his writing) As the police would say there you have motive.

Perhaps not - I am in no way insinuating that they made the figures up or pulled them out of thin air; perhaps they are going with "what they know", figures that were commonly accepted as fact back during the war that have persisted until know. Other common myths like the "3:1" rule persist under the same logic.

For example I know that JRT Wood has stats from his time in RIC (Rhodesian Intelligence Corps) when he specifically studied Fire Force operations. I assume Bax has Selous Scouts stats to support his figures. So we are really at a take-it-or-leave-it situation.

Fact is, nobody can say what it is because there is absolutely no reference at all to the Malayan or Rhodesian figures and the objective reader can't go off of the author's word only. There needs to be, at the very least, an explanation as too how such figures are derived or where they originated from.

I will pass that on to the authors

When it comes down to it, this is an interesting piece that I enjoyed but it can only be taken as a matter of historical opinion rather than a concrete historical examination of tactics.

I suggest that the only aspect subject to query is the claim to the 80% kill rate (and then only because the source is not a published document). For the rest the history as written by Bax/Hatfill is accurate. You can take my word for that and I could probably get 100 odd people who served to sign an affidavit to that effect. Their recommendations for the application of the FF concept in today's wars is what is open to debate (not the history).

What seems to be getting up your nose is the quote "fireforce tactics are more effective than conventional COIN tactics".

This what they said:

The conventional counter-insurgency tactics of foot patrols, ambushes, tracking, aerial reconnaissance and local interrogation/interdiction techniques have proven largely ineffective in locating and killing terrorists during past campaigns.

and this:

If the US Military is to become serious about winning the war on terror, it must abandon the shackles of past conventional tactics and become more adaptable at finding, engaging and killing an enemy that is ruthless, cunning, and fleet-footed.

As to the first comment I agree fully (from my personal experience). The productivity/reward/results/whatever from the type of operations mentioned is low. This low productivity may have become an accepted way things are but perhaps if one sat down and calculated the number of man hours used to find and kill/capture an insurgent one would find oneself on agreement with Bax/Hatfill on this. The game changer of course is good real-time intel to act upon. What percentage of these type of ops are mounted upon hard real-time intel? What could we say here... that most are speculative and based on guess work and worked around how many call-signs are available to deploy that must be deployed rather than let them sit around the base until good intel pops up.

So if a call-sign has a contact... eureka... you have found the insurgents. Now the trick is surely to do whatever you can to keep in contact with them so as to extract the maximum number of causalities. Now if there is a QRF (of some type) that can help you achieve this then surely you want to use them, yes? You need fresh troops and probably trackers to get right after them and keep the pressure on. The modern night imaging equipment allows all operations to continue through the night. Again more pressure.

The idea is surely to make contact, keep contact and extract the maximum casualties in the process, yes? Helicopters (to move troops rapidly, as gunships and as an airborne command platform) can be useful in this process.

As to the second comment it is up to the US military to respond to that.

...and from what I have heard these HVT hits are really very similar to a Fire Force action at night. They know where the bad guy is, the launch an airborne raid/attack against him/them... and they close with and kill him/them. Then they get into the aircraft and go home. Perhaps rather than try to adopt this from the 'bottom up' it is better to do like the Brits have done and attach a battalion (1 Para) to special forces and let them cut their teeth on easier targets and then expand the targets to any Taliban groups (not just HVT leadership) both day and night.