Slaughter at FOB Keating

Still following up on this month's slaughter of American troops at Camp Keating...

Even civilians, who don't often rally to the tick-tock of the war, are so troubled by the incident at Camp Keating that they continue to ask how this happened. How was an entire American military encampment so vulnerable to attack that it was overrun by literally scores of enemy combatants? How did our troops end up - again - in a Broken Arrow situation?

You can point to a problem with Lessons Learned.

In answer to reader Phyllis' query, below, Concrete Bob pointed to lessons we should have learned the hard way:

When enemy combatants are dressed the same as LIP's (Land Indeginous Personnel/Local Indeginous People), when they use mosques to shield their activities, and when they have no compunction about using and/or murdering civilians to further their efforts. They know our military is prohibited from engaging if civilians are present. I would not be surprised to learn they have acquired TAC COMM capabilities and can hear what our guys are saying. Does any of this sound familiar? Haven't we been through a similar situation before? Didn't we learn anything from Viet Nam? The only difference I see is terrain and climate.

We also should have learned lessons that were passed down to us through a long line of warrior-sages.

The great ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu wrote in his treatise, The Art of War:

When in difficult country, do not encamp. Also: Do not linger in dangerously isolated positions.

And yet, our men whose leaders presumably can quote Sun Tzu (and Clausewitz, etc.) in their sleep, were placed inside a base so vulnerable that soldiers referred to the area leading into Camp Keating as "Ambush Alley."

As reported in Chandler's Watch:

When a reporter visited the base a few months after it opened, soldiers stationed in Kamdesh complained the base’s location low in a valley made most missions in the area difficult.
“We’re primarily sitting ducks,” said one soldier at the time.

Known as Camp Keating, the outpost was “not meant for engagements,” said one senior State Department official assigned to Afghanistan, and brings “a sad and terrible conclusion” to a three-year effort to secure roads and connect the Nuristan province to the central government in Kabul.

You also can point to a failure of intelligence, including the failure to plan. I wrote about this two years ago, when I faulted former CIA Chief George Tenet for allowing our HUMINT networks to founder. In a 2007 commentary for the D.C. Examiner, I wrote, in part:

In 1985, when Tenet joined the staff on the powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the United States deployed a multitude of clandestine agents in the ongoing Cold War against communism. Tenet saw how the brave covert warriors risked and sometimes sacrificed their lives while keeping the Soviet Bloc at bay. He also saw how their work paid off.

In the late 1980s, the Cold War presented a seemingly lesser threat. The intelligence overseers — Tenet included — adopted what can only be described as severe myopia, reading a reduced Soviet threat to mean that we needed fewer covert operations overall.

With little or no HUMINT, our men did not know precisely how many forces were massed in the overlooks on each side of the narrow valley. Nor did they know exactly how the enemy planned to attack in a time and a place of our choosing.

So many questions remain unanswered; and I predict that the Slaughter at FOB Keating will be discussed and analyzed for years to come. Lest too much time pass between the attack and its placement as a curriculum item at West Point, I would like to offer a connecting thread of thought. No, Afghanistan is not Vietnam; but certain things do parallel.

Observe the dramarization below, on a prior and well known Broken Arrow incident.

Do we really want this to happen again to our troops?