Niger: a Sahel country bumping along (catch all)

[davidbfpo]

Some curious information in this NYT report:

American troops who came under fire in Niger...might have waited more than an hour before calling for help....one reason might be that they thought they could fight back against the Islamic State-affiliated militants who attacked them.

Though helicopters did not arrive until an hour after the troops called for help, a drone arrived overhead in minutes, General Dunford said, though he would not say whether it was armed.

Link:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/w...-dunford.html?

[AdamG]

Some curious information

By 'curious', you mean more and more it's sounding like a complete Charlie Foxtrot?

Sources for this ABC report basically says the same thing.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/died-...ry?id=50670787

What was started as a reconnaissance mission to meet with local leaders turned into a kill-or-capture mission aimed at a high-value target, according to both sources.
*
“They should have been up and back in a day. Because they were up there so f------ long on a mission that morphed, they were spotted, surveilled and ultimately hit,” the official said.
*
Their pre-mission threat assessment never considered the possibility of 50 to 60 enemy combatants attacking them, according to the official.
*
On their way back, the team received a call from the base back in Niamey, asking them to turn around and kill or capture a high-value target who is a known al Qaeda and ISIS operative, according to two senior officials.
*
The team arrived at the target location in the early morning hours of Oct. 4, but found nothing. They burned the remnants of the abandoned campsite and headed back south as the sun came up, stopping back through a nearby village called Tongo Tongo around 8:30 AM.
There, the Nigerien force requested they stop to eat, while U.S. soldiers met with a village elder, who was “obviously and deliberately trying to stall them,” according to the official.
“He was definitely stalling as long as he could to keep us there,” the survivor said, saying he had an entourage, showed the unit a child with an illness, and even grabbed a goat he wanted to prepare for them.

[davidbfpo]

By 'curious', you mean more and more it's sounding like a complete Charlie Foxtrot?

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

Sadly the deaths have aroused far greater political and media attention to Niger and AFRICOM's activity.

The Soufan Report's latest comment ends with:

The pace of joint operations in Africa involving U.S. personnel will likely increase in the foreseeable future, as the conditions that help fuel terrorist and insurgent groups continue to worsen.

Link:http://www.soufangroup.com/tsc-intel...bush-in-niger/

There is an older thread on Niger, with mainly historical posts: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]

By 'curious', you mean more and more it's sounding like a complete Charlie Foxtrot?

Complete
Charlie
Foxtrot.

...soldiers who survived the ambush and villagers who witnessed it point to a series of intelligence failures and strategic miscalculations that left the American soldiers far from base, in hostile territory longer than planned, with no backup or air support, on a mission they had not expected to perform.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...-soldiers.html

[davidbfpo]

Some here I expect will dismiss this NYT report, so here are two comments via Twitter that might persuade you. Professor Bruce Hoffman:

Superb account of the micro (tragically personal) and macro (open ended strategic) contours of our ongoing war on terrorism...

Professor Daniel Byman:

I can’t recommend enough

[AdamG]

WASHINGTON — The leader of an ill-fated team of American soldiers in Niger last fall warned before the mission that his troops did not have the equipment or intelligence necessary to carry out a kill-or-capture raid against a local militant, according to preliminary findings of a continuing Defense Department investigation.

The preliminary findings, according to the first two Defense Department officials, imply that senior officers up the chain of command believed Team 3212 was embarking only on the daylong reconnaissance mission, as Captain Perozeni outlined in his Conop document. That trip, of 11 Americans and some 30 Nigerien soldiers, described a “civil reconnaissance” mission meant for “key-leader engagement meetings.”

Before he left Ouallam, those officials said, Captain Perozeni received the order to join the kill-or-capture mission against Mr. Cheffou, to be led by a separate assault force flying out of the town of Arlit. The order came from another junior officer, who was filling in for a regional commander on paternity leave.

Captain Perozeni pushed back against the change of mission, citing concerns over insufficient intelligence and equipment available to his team on the high-risk raid. But he did not resist orders to back up the separate assault force, the officials said.

As it turned out, that mission was later scrapped because of bad weather. Team 3212 was still on its reconnaissance mission, near the town of Tiloa, when American intelligence officials concluded that Mr. Cheffou and a handful of fighters had left their desert encampment near the border with Mali. The team was ordered to press on to that location, hoping to collect any information left behind that might offer clues about Mr. Cheffou’s hide-outs and network.

But the preliminary investigation indicates that senior officers at the Africa Command headquarters and its Special Operations component in Stuttgart were not informed of the change of plans. Nor were senior leaders at a Special Operations regional command in Chad, according to the findings.

However, according to the third Defense Department official, a lieutenant colonel in Chad had already approved both the helicopter raid based from Arlit, which was scrapped, and Team 3212’s original reconnaissance mission, which had taken it just 15 miles from the ambush site outside the village of Tongo Tongo.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/w...nt-report.html

Note: there is an ISIS propaganda video making the rounds of the interwebz that incorporates go-pro video from the SF troops killed in this action. Said video shows Americans being shot and dying. See http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...-4-troops.html

[AdamG]

AGADEZ, Niger (AP) — On the scorching edge of the Sahara Desert, the U.S. Air Force is building a base for armed drones, the newest front in America's battle against the growing extremist threat in Africa's vast Sahel region.

Three hangars and the first layers of a runway command a sandy, barren field. Niger Air Base 201 is expected to be functional early next year. The base, a few miles outside Agadez and built at the request of Niger's government, will eventually house fighter jets and MQ-9 drones transferred from the capital Niamey. The drones, with surveillance and added striking capabilities, will have a range enabling them to reach a number of West and North African countries.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-builds...090624861.html

[AdamG]

Poor training, complacency and a culture of excessive risk contributed to the deaths of four U.S. soldiers during an operation in Niger in October, according to a classified Pentagon report.
The report, described by officials familiar with its contents, details a series of missteps and describes a disregard for military procedures and for the chain of command.
Among other things, the report discloses that low-level commanders, determined to make a mark against local jihadis in the West African nation, took liberties to get operations approved through the chain of command.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/classif...=djemalertNEWS

Cluster.