My battalion had to detach a company to work in vicinity of Gereshk during the last deploy, and they had a hard fight there. No doubt, the issue of insurgent cover, concealment, and mobility has been with us from day one. This isn't an issue of the Taliban being able to engage a USAF SAR bird with a brace of Pedros in the back, from a treeline, and I don't think that incident is symptomatic of a larger issue. Sure, they made good use of cover and lighting it up with a minigun makes for a good tale, but if it wasn't a canal depression or a hedgerow, it would be a compound wall, or a mud guest house, or a mosque. I suppose we could just blaze away at them too, but I wouldn't advise that.
The Taliban aren't entrenched because of the trenches--they're entrenched because of the human terrain, in my opinion.
It's not like these knuckleheads spend all their time lying up in harbor sites in the sticks. They conduct an amazing amount of movement in the open, scooting around via pickups, 'motorcyclos', heck, even tractors. When we are positioned well enough to ambush them, we hit jackpot and we win hands-down. We, the Brits, Canadians, Danes, etc., have tended to enjoy similar success during meeting engagements as well. They know this and therefore pick their battles wisely, generally preferring to set up on a principal direction of fire, use IEDs as protective obstacles, and engage us in a very narrow engagement window that tends to not last very long, and then get out of Dodge.
The larger issue is a lack of boots on the ground, Afghan National Security Forces development, and our FOB/COP-centric means of waging this fight. Cover and concealment is something like 0.1% of the problem, and there are a slew of bigger ones we'd have to tackle before cover becomes relevant.
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