What is presence patrolling?

[jcustis]

With that in mind, I think our military is still overly risk adverse (a by product of the Khobar Towers Investigation, which IMO was unprofessionally done, and resulted in great harm to the force overall). Mission success was still touted as achieving your objective (task/purpose), but the reality was that it was understood it was take no casualties (training or in conflict). Operations were more focused on force protection than accomplishing the objective, which is what I interpret when I read the posts that are opposed to presence patrols.

Yes Bill, we run the risk of talking past each other even though we are in fact aiming for the same thing.

If I were king, the patrol base would only be there for discrete re-arm/refit/reset purposes. Patrols go out and remain out, with resupply and maintenance conducted forward, not aboard the PB. That's what your combat trains are for, but after six years of FOB life, we've lost that skill to a great degree.

There's nothing hard about that...you take your bivvy with you, aggregate to a large enough force at night to afford a rest cycle and an active defense, and you stay in the field for as many nights as you can. Or even better, you balance day/night operations so you can afford to work a reverse cycle and patrol when knuckleheads like to move around and gather, and go into a defense when you can see better in the day. If you think you are coming back inside the wire, there had better be a damn good reason for it. That's the damn life the infantryman lives and I think it is a shame that so many people forgot that. The only folks holding ground at a COP/FOB need to be the C2 and CSS nodes, as well as any security forces training folks like MiTTs and PiTTs, who need to be with their counterpart force.

It has taken conscious effort to break that cycle and put Marines and Soldiers outside the wire for any more than 24 hours it seems, and I feel passionately that we lost a lot of young men and women in Iraq because we did not employ this tactic. In turn, it took us longer than necessary to pull the population away from the insurgent, and we gave up too much ground gained the day prior, only to allow someone to drive over an IED at the same spot we had patrolled past in the previous 24 hours (just once though).

I don't want patrols to be bound by pinpoint tasks before they sally forth. They should be steady-state operations that can transition fluidly from a movement to contact, to an area reconnaissance, then a route reconnaissance, followed by a couple of contact patrols to visit the local chief of police, mayor, and cement plant, and then full circle as information is developed. FOB life kills our tempo, and we tend to walk like Frankenstein in the pursuit of the knuckleheads who oppose us, instead of population security becoming a natural derivative of our presence - while we are already on task.