Quote Originally Posted by AmericanPride View Post

Is there difficulty in the Army/military/American culture in accepting that an enemy is capable of inflicting serious harm on us without our having made a serious or grave mistake that enables them to do so? Is the Afghan insurgency so weak that it's successes can only come from when we make mistakes? Does this affect our capacity to make accurate assessments of the situation and to craft effective COAs?


Good point.
To what extent does this ‘difficulty in our culture’ allow us to only see every incident that leaves casualties on our side as a defeat or disaster, exacerbated of course by our very aversion to risk and casualties. At the tactical level, was COP Keating really that much of a defeat? Sure, 8 KIA is tragic. But the comparative statistics don’t actually look that bad given that the Taliban lost about 150. And as for the loss of the post it depends on how much value we choose to adhere to that particular piece of turf. I realise that this is looking purely at numbers but compare it to other defeats like those caused by IEDs. Look at any IED incident or combination of them where the casualty count is similar and see what damage we were able to inflict in return. (I say ‘we’ in the broadest sense; it doesn’t include yours truly from behind my laptop)

So perhaps we could even take that a step further and reverse our view on this. Given that the enemy tends to have the initiative most of the time anyway, would an increased use of these COPs not be a way to draw them out and meet them head on? And then the ‘true believers’ can do the humping with heavy weights. And when they operate in larger groups like this they should in a sense be easier to deal with as the battle becomes more ‘conventional’.
With other words, give them bait and reason to group up and take the battle to us.

Just some simplistic thoughts…