Niger: a Sahel country bumping along (catch all)

[AdamG]

Additional details for those with WaPo access.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...ffb_story.html

From my "armchair" I would not reach such a conclusion.

Seriously? From what we can both read, it sounds far from a sunny day in paradise.

As previously reported, Coalition forces have been in western Niger for awhile and suffered no causalities while engaging ISIS&friends.

This is the sequence of high points;

1) Simple in-and-out mission gets an additional tasker, which means loitering in a bad neighborhood. The "three hour tour" song from Gilligan's Island should have started playing about then.

2) Reinforcing element doesn't show up for the extended mission, Lord knows why.

3) Local headman obviously stalling the group.

4) Complex double-tap ambush, implication is that they were up against competent opponents. See Threat Assessment, above - contradiction there.

5) Contact report sounds like it took an hour??to get out after first shot. Perhaps the primary comms were eliminated in the first RPG volley, but that's bad. Very bad.

6) French air assets hauled ass to provide cover, but targets not clearly marked. There's SOPs for signaling that a danger close strike would be appreciated.

Not pointing fingers but the overall situation sounds exactly like a Charlie Foxtrot*, with four US and five Nigerian KIA.

* Previous example of a Charlie Foxtrot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kamdesh

[davidbfpo]

Andrew Lebovich, a regional SME who has actually been there, has a column in FP. It ends with:

And while the threat to international interests in the region is real, it is these local communities whose lives are affected the most by these groups and by government responses — and also the local communities that will be most able to constrain them.
There is much we still do not know about what happened near Tongo Tongo on Oct. 4. But instead of looking at Niger as just another outpost of the global war on terror, our attention should be on the local and regional environments where these groups operate — and where the brunt of any increased military action will be felt the most.

Link:http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/27/...-are-in-niger/

[AdamG]

The US special forces detachment ambushed in the Niger last month fought alone for hours after the local Nigerien forces they were accompanying fled in the first minutes of the engagement, retired and serving special forces officers with knowledge of events have said.
The trapped soldiers also made repeated efforts to convince French warplanes sent from neighbouring Mali to engage the enemy, attempting to “talk in” the pilots who refused to attack due to poor weather, rough terrain and an inability to differentiate friend from foe, the officers said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...lp-sources-say

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to WoTR for their article, authored by a recent US SOF commander for the region and his key question:

Where exactly does the United States need to project power abroad to prevent strategic surprise?

Later he provides a partial answer:

America does not need special operators lurking in every shadowy corner of the globe but good strategy relies on contextual and geographic awareness.

Link:https://warontherocks.com/2017/12/pl...te-operations/

On my second reading this sounds similar to the Imperial era debate over how to safeguard India's northwest frontier, notably how 'forward' that defence should be.

[AdamG]

Caveat: source is Buzzfeed

Sources told BuzzFeed News that the deaths at the village of Tongo Tongo could have been avoided if the mission was better planned and that it is not known whether the calls were made by the soldiers or their commanders back at the base.
BuzzFeed said that it talked to a Nigerian general, a pair of senior military officials and an official from Nigeria's anti-terror unit for its report.

The soldiers had entered a hotbed of militants, which was considered to be "red zone" that had been labeled out of bounds by the U.S., BuzzFeed noted, saying the soldiers lacked sufficient evidence at the time of the operation in which a series of "negligent" errors were made.
There had been 46 militant attacks in the area over the past year, however, the U.S. soldiers traveled in unarmored pickup trucks and were not heavily armed when they were ambushed by the militants outside of Tongo Tongo.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...cid=spartandhp

Full article here
https://www.buzzfeed.com/monicamark/...Zy#.dgmA0ZrwAD

“Socafrica has, in recent years, become increasingly secretive, unaccountable, clientelistic, and — as recent episodes suggest — reckless. Odds are they didn't have the granularity of intel to offset the risk of such a mission,” said Matthew Page, a former Africa specialist with the State Department’s intelligence arm. “I think the bigger issue at stake here is the degree to which Special Forces Africa is increasingly seen by US diplomats and defense officials as a ‘rogue element’ that is pushing the envelope on its missions and activities in the Sahel, and elsewhere in Africa, without explicit buy-in from US policymakers, diplomats, or even senior military commanders.”

The manner in which the US soldiers’ corpses were found pointed to a plan to capture at least some of them alive. “The soldiers were found naked because the militants took everything they could — military uniforms, weapons, comms equipment,” the Nigerien general told BuzzFeed News, contradicting US officials who have publicly said there were no indications troops fell into enemy hands. “They wanted to cart them away [alive] so that people wouldn’t know if they were dead or alive as hostages. It would have been a negotiating tactic.” That plan was likely scuppered when the arrival of French jets forced the militants to flee.

[AdamG]

NIAMEY, Niger – The body of Sgt. La David Johnson, one of four U.S. soldiers killed in an ambush by Islamist militants in Niger last month, was found with his arms tied and a gaping wound at the back of his head, according to two villagers, suggesting that he may have been captured and then executed.
Adamou Boubacar, a 23-year-old farmer and trader, said some children tending cattle found the remains of the soldier Oct. 6, two days after the attack outside the remote Niger village of Tongo Tongo, which also left five Nigerien soldiers dead. The kids notified him.
When Boubacar went to the location, a bushy area roughly a mile from the ambush site, he saw Johnson’s body lying face down, he said. The back of his head had been smashed by something, possibly a bullet, said Boubacar. The soldier’s wrists were bound with rope, he said, raising the possibility that the militants – whom the Pentagon suspects were affiliated with the Islamic State – seized Johnson during the firefight and held him captive.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/201...and-apparentl/

[AdamG]

More 'anonymous sources'.

A military probe concluded that Johnson wasn't captured alive or killed at close range, dispelling a swirl of rumors about how he died, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin says.
The report has determined that Johnson, 25, of Miami Gardens, Florida, was hit as many as 18 times and killed by enemy rifle and machine gun fire from members of an Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) offshoot, according to U.S. officials familiar with the findings. The Oct. 4 ambush took place about 120 miles north of Niamey, the African nation's capital. Johnson's body was recovered two days later.
U.S. officials familiar with the findings spoke on condition of anonymity to describe details of an investigation that has not been finalized or publicly released.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/army-sg...ilitary-report