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The U.S. Marine Corps, which has long recognized the importance of influencing the civilian population in a counterinsurgency environment, requested an evaluation of the effectiveness of the psychological operations element of U.S. military information operations in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2010 based on how well messages and themes were tailored to target audiences. This monograph responds to that request.

In Quagmire you'll find a range of voices-men and women, military and civilian-and a range of perspectives from the homeland, the combat zone, and war's aftermath. These personal responses to war in Iraq and Afghanistan have been selected from War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its inaugural publication. The responses cover approximately fifteen years of the United States' conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and demonstrate the aftermath of war and the degreed ripples that extend beyond soldiers to families and friends, lovers, hometowns, even pets. As citizens, Pablo Neruda advised, we have an obligation to \"come and see the blood in the streets.\" To ignore what we do in war and what war does to us is to move willfully toward ignorance. To ignore such reminders imperils ourselves, our communities, and our nation.

Doctors at Waris a candid account of a trauma surgical team based, for a tour of duty, at a field hospital in Helmand, Afghanistan. Mark de Rond tells of the highs and lows of surgical life in hard-hitting detail, bringing to life a morally ambiguous world in which good people face impossible choices and in which routines designed to normalize experience have the unintended effect of highlighting war's absurdity. With stories that are at once comical and tragic, de Rond captures the surreal experience of being a doctor at war. He lifts the cover on a world rarely ever seen, let alone written about, and provides a poignant counterpoint to the archetypical, adrenaline-packed, macho tale of what it is like to go to war. Here the crude and visceral coexist with the tender and affectionate. The author tells of well-meaning soldiers at hospital reception, there to deliver a pair of legs in the belief that these can be reattached to their comrade, now in mid-surgery; of midsummer Christmas parties and pancake breakfasts and late-night sauna sessions; of interpersonal rivalries and banter; of caring too little or too much; of tenderness and compassion fatigue; of hell and redemption; of heroism and of playing God. While many good firsthand accounts of war by frontline soldiers exist, this is one of the first books ever to bring to life the experience of the surgical teams tasked with mending what war destroys.

Security force assistance is central to the counterinsurgency campaign of U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. The outcome will hinge on the effectiveness of the assistance provided to the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, and other security forces. This report provides an overview of Soviet efforts to improve and facilitate the training and development of Afghan security forces.

This book identifies some of the main lessons for civil-military interactions that can be derived from the experiences of Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan. The book has three main themes. Firstly, the volume analyses why the ways in which civil and military actors interact in theatres of operations such as Afghanistan matter — for both those categories of actors, and for the ordinary people who their interactions serve. Second, the book highlights that these interactions are invariably complex. The third theme, which arises specifically from 'the PRT experience' in Afghanistan, is that such teams vary significantly in their roles, resourcing, and operational environments. Consequently, to appraise the value of ‘the PRT experience’, it is necessary to unpack the experiences of different PRTs, which the use of case studies allows one to do. The volume comprises an introduction, identifying some key questions to which the PRT experience gives rise, and case studies of the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, The Netherlands, Australia, Germany and France; chapters dealing with the roles played by NGOs and the UN system and a discussion from an Afghan perspective of the implications of civilian casualties. It is the combination of the diverse cases discussed in this book with a focus on the broad challenges of optimizing civil-military interactions that makes this book distinctive. This book will be of much interest to students of the Afghan War, civil-military relations, state-building, Central Asian politics and IR in general.

Summarizes how many Army personnel have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan through December 2011.

Douglas Grindle provides a firsthand account of how the war in Afghanistan was won in a rural district south of Kandahar City and how the newly created peace slipped away when vital resources failed to materialize and the United States headed for the exit.By placing the reader at the heart of the American counterinsurgency effort, Grindle reveals little-known incidents, including the failure of expensive aid programs to target local needs, the slow throttling of local government as official funds failed to reach the districts, and the United States' inexplicable failure to empower the Afghan local officials even after they succeeded in bringing the people onto their side. Grindle presents the side of the hard-working Afghans who won the war and expresses what they really thought of the U.S. military and its decisions. Written by a former field officer for the U.S. Agency for International Development, this story of dashed hopes and missed opportunities details how America's desire to leave the war behind ultimately overshadowed its desire to sustain victory.

Long considered the masters of counterinsurgency, the British military encountered significant problems in Iraq and Afghanistan when confronted with insurgent violence. In their effort to apply the principles and doctrines of past campaigns, they failed to prevent Basra and Helmand from descending into lawlessness, criminality, and violence. By juxtaposing the deterioration of these situations against Britain's celebrated legacy of counterinsurgency, this investigation identifies both the contributions and limitations of traditional tactics in such settings, exposing a disconcerting gap between ambitions and resources, intent and commitment. Building upon this detailed account of the Basra and Helmand campaigns, this volume conducts an unprecedented assessment of British military institutional adaptation in response to operations gone awry. In calling attention to the enduring effectiveness of insurgent methods and the threat posed by undergoverned spaces, David H. Ucko and Robert Egnell underscore the need for military organizations to meet the irregular challenges of future wars in new ways.

\"We aren't home yet,\" Major Paul Darling reminds his team at the end of a sixteen-hour day. \"Two more miles and we are done. We have pissed off a lot of Taliban today, and they are going to want payback.\" Shortly, the major will find himself sitting on a concrete basketball court next to the bunker where the day started so long ago, talking by satellite phone to his wife on the other side of the world. When she asks, \"What happened?\" there is too much to say. But one day, he promises himself, he will put into words what it was like-one day in the life of a combat soldier in Afghanistan in 2009. This is the story of that day. In crisp prose and sharp detail Darling offers a moment-by-moment account of a one-day mission to track down and kill Taliban insurgents in the Zabul Province of southeastern Afghanistan. A rare day-in-the-life narrative that is also a page-turner, his story captures the mundane realities of deployment-the waiting, the heat, the heavy gear, the 0345 wake-up-along with the high-octane experience of crossing foreign terrain where every turn, every decision might have life or death consequences. The living accommodations, reporting up the chain of command, the bureaucracy, and the almost insurmountable challenges of functioning effectively in two cultures-all become intimately real in Darling's telling as he balances the imperatives of his mission and the skills of his men against the ever-multiplying unknowns, the unpredictable and dangerous Afghan \"allies,\" and the elusive enemy: the unseen IED and the possibility of fatal miscalculation. In the midst of the soldier's everyday drama of never quite knowing what comes next, Darling's moments of humor and reflection put the chaos and uncertainties of combat into a larger perspective. The story is about one man and the ethical choices and compromises he has to make as a leader-a man who has promises to keep: to family; to country; to his soldiers, both Afghan and American; and, ultimately, to himself.

John Spencer was a new second lieutenant in 2003 when he parachuted into Iraq leading a platoon of infantry soldiers into battle. During that combat tour he learned how important unit cohesion was to surviving a war, both physically and mentally. He observed that this cohesion developed as the soldiers experienced the horrors of combat as a group, spending their downtime together and processing their shared experiences. When Spencer returned to Iraq five years later to take command of a troubled company, he found that his lessons on how to build unit cohesion were no longer as applicable. Rather than bonding and processing trauma as a group, soldiers now spent their downtime separately, on computers communicating with family back home. Spencer came to see the internet as a threat to unit cohesion, but when he returned home and his wife was deployed, the internet connected him and his children to his wife on a daily basis. In Connected Soldiers Spencer delivers lessons learned about effective methods for building teams in a way that overcomes the distractions of home and the outside world, without reducing the benefits gained from connections to family.