Gen James Mattis @ Centcom

Petraeus’s Successor Is Known for Impolitic Words
By THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON — To those who have served under him, Gen. James N. Mattis is the consummate Marine commander, a warrior who chooses to lead from the front lines and speaks bluntly rather than concerning himself with political correctness.

But General Mattis, President Obama’s choice to command American forces across the strategic crescent that encompasses Iraq and Afghanistan, has also been occasionally seen by his civilian superiors as too rough-edged at a time when military strategy is as much about winning the allegiance of local populations as it is about firepower.

If his predecessor as the commander of Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus, is known for his skill at winning over constituencies outside the military, General Mattis has a reputation for candid, Patton-esque statements that are not always appreciated inside or outside the Pentagon.

“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” General Mattis said during a forum in San Diego in 2005. “You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

For those comments, he received an official rebuke. His career path, however, was not seriously altered, and he now finds himself awaiting Senate confirmation to take over one of the most important jobs in the military. His new assignment would nominally put him atop General Petraeus — now the commander in Afghanistan — in the chain of command and leave him overseeing the reduction of American troops in Iraq, the escalation in Afghanistan and an array of potential threats from across the Middle East and South Asia, including Iran.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described General Mattis’s significant professional growth as he rose through the senior ranks, in particular at his current post atop the military’s Joint Forces Command. “I watched him interact in NATO at the highest levels, diplomatically, politically, and on very sensitive subjects,” Admiral Mullen said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates described General Mattis as “one of our military’s outstanding combat leaders and strategic thinkers.”

But the general angered one of Mr. Gates’s predecessors, Donald H. Rumsfeld, in 2001 with another remark that played well with his Marines, but not with civilian leaders in Washington. After Marines under his command seized an airstrip outside Kandahar, establishing the first forward operating base for conventional forces in the country, General Mattis declared, “The Marines have landed, and we now own a piece of Afghanistan.”

Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior officials believed that these words violated the official message of the invasion, that the United States had no desire to occupy a Muslim nation, but was fighting to free Afghanistan from the Taliban tyranny.

General Mattis is viewed differently by those who have been with him on the front lines.

It was the first winter of the war in Afghanistan, when the wind stabbed like an ice pick and fingertips froze to triggers, but a young lieutenant’s blood simmered as he approached a Marine fighting hole and spotted three heads silhouetted in the moonlight. He had ordered only two Marines to stand watch while the rest of the platoon was ordered to rest before an expected Taliban attack at first light.

“I dropped down into the hole, and there were two junior Marines,” the lieutenant, Nathaniel C. Fick, recalled of that overnight operation outside Kandahar. “But the third was General Mattis. He has a star on his collar and could have been sleeping on a cot with a major waiting to make him coffee. But he’s out there in the cold in the middle of the night, doing the same thing I’m doing as a first lieutenant — checking on his men.”

The military career of the previous top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, ended over comments he made to Rolling Stone magazine that were read as disparagements of civilian leadership. Yet even in that context, General Mattis’s past provocative comments do not appear to have caused any serious second thoughts about him at the Pentagon or the White House.

“General Mattis is a warrior’s warrior,” said Mr. Fick, who served twice under his command —in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, and in Iraq in 2003 — and is now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a nonpartisan policy institute. “That’s a virtue not always appreciated in American society.”

Associates of General Mattis offer an explanation for the contradiction of a general who uses “ain’t” in public but devotes his government moving allowance to hauling a library of 6,000 books from station to station, forgoing most personal effects.

He is a reader of philosophy who has patterned his speeches and writings on Aristotle’s famous dictum on effective communications: Know your audience. When he is speaking to Marines, he speaks like a Marine. When he is speaking to defense chiefs or senior government leaders, he uses their language.

And he is a reader of history. He was once asked which American Indian warrior he most respected. His answer was a tribe-by-tribe, chief-by-chief exposition spanning the first Seminole war to the surrender of the Lakota.

Just hours before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in which General Mattis ordered his force on a race from Kuwait to Baghdad, sowing chaos among Iraqi units along the way, he wrote a message to Marines under his command that encapsulates the general’s thinking.

“While we will move swiftly and aggressively against those who resist, we will treat all others with decency, demonstrating chivalry and soldierly compassion for people who have endured a lifetime under Saddam’s oppression,” he wrote.

“Engage your brain before you engage your weapon,” the general added.

He is sure to be tested at Central Command, where his tasks include maintaining relations with allies, some dear and some difficult; building the capabilities of unstable nations to defend themselves against terrorists or other threats; and always, always, keeping an eye on Iran.

The Central Command post in some ways is diminished, since there is an officer of equal rank in charge of the war in Iraq and another for Afghanistan, both falling within the Central Command’s area of responsibility.

Senior officers predict there will be little friction as General Mattis moves into command over General Petraeus, who now has been cast, for a second time, in the role of savior for a faltering war effort. In fact, some officers suggested that General Mattis should have been considered for the Afghan command, but senior officials wanted the more polished Petraeus, given the circumstances of General McChrystal’s removal, and the fact that General Petraeus already was involved in developing the Afghan strategy.

Generals Mattis and Petraeus have worked together before, in writing the military’s manual on counterinsurgency, which has become the guiding concept for both wars — and for which General Mattis rarely gets credit.

A rare happy IED story

SOUTHERN SHORSURAK, Afghanistan (July 12, 2010

Cpl. Matt Garst should be dead.

Few people survive stepping on an improvised explosive device. Even fewer walk away the same day after directly absorbing the force of the blast, but Garst did just that.

A squad leader with 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Garst was leading his squad on a patrol in Southern Shorsurak, Afghanistan, June 23 to establish a vehicle checkpoint in support of Operation New Dawn.

The men were four miles from Lima Company’s newly established observation post when they approached an abandoned compound close to where they needed to set up their checkpoint. It would serve well as an operating base — a place for the squad to set up communications and rotate Marines in and out of. But first, it had to be secured. As they swept the area with a metal detector, the IED registered no warning on the device. The bomb was buried too deep and its metallic signature too weak. Two men walked over it without it detonating.

At six feet, two inches tall and 260 pounds with all his gear on, Garst is easily the largest man in his squad by 30 or 40 pounds — just enough extra weight to trigger the IED buried deep in hard-packed soil.

Lance Cpl. Edgar Jones, a combat engineer with the squad, found a pressure plate inside the compound and hollered to Garst, asking what he should do with it. Garst turned around to answer the Marine and stepped on the bomb. “I can just barely remember the boom,” Garst said. “I remember the start of a loud noise and then I blacked out.”

Since Garst's improbable run-in with the IED, his tale has spread through the rest of the battalion, and as often happens in combat units, the story mutates, the tale becoming more and more extraordinary about what happened next: He held onto his rifle the whole time … He actually landed on his feet … He remained unmoved, absorbing the impact like he was muffling a fart in a crowded elevator …

What really happened even eludes Garst. All went black after the earth uppercut him. When he came to, he was standing on his feet holding his weapon, turning to see the remnants of the blast and wondering why his squad had a look on their faces as if they’d seen a ghost.

Marines in Lima Company think Garst is the luckiest guy in the battalion, and while that may seem a fair assessment, it was the enemy’s shoddy work that left Garst standing. The three-liters of homemade explosive only partially detonated.

Marines who witnessed the event from inside the compound caught glimpses of Garst’s feet flailing through the air just above the other side of the building’s eight-foot walls. The explosion knocked him at least fifteen feet away where he landed on his limp head and shoulders before immediately standing back up.

Not quite sure of what had just happened, Garst turned back toward the blast, now nothing but a column of dirt and smoke rising toward the sun. “My first thought was, ‘Oh shit, I just hit an IED,’” he said. “Then I thought, ‘Well I’m standing. That’s good.’”

Garst’s squad stared at him in disbelief. The square-jawed Marine has a tendency to be short-tempered, and the realization that the blast was meant to kill him spiked his adrenaline and anger.

“It pissed me off,” he said.

He directed his men to establish a security perimeter while letting them know in his own way that he was OK.

“What the f--- are you looking at?” he said. “Get on the cordon!”

Garst quickly radioed back to base, calling an explosive ordnance disposal team and quick reaction force. “I called them and said, ‘hey, I just got blown up. Get ready,’” he said. “The guy thought I was joking at first. ‘You got blown up? You’re not calling me. Get out of here.’”

Once EOD cleared the area, Garst led his squad the four miles back to their observation post — just hours after being ragdolled by an IED blast.“I wasn’t going to let anybody else take my squad back after they’d been there for me,” he said. “That’s my job.”

The next day Garst awoke with a pounding headache and was as sore as he’d ever been in his life. “Just getting up from trying to sleep was painful,” he said.

But he saw no reason being sore should slow him down. He popped some ibuprofen and after a day of rest, Garst was back out on patrol, showing his Marines and the enemy that just like his resolve — Garst is unbreakable.

Petraeus to Review Mc's inane ROE's

Petraeus reviews directive meant to limit Afghan civilian deaths

By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 2010; A01

To the U.S. soldiers getting pounded with thunderous mortar rounds in their combat outpost near Kandahar, it seemed like a legitimate request: allow them to launch retaliatory mortar shells or summon an airstrike against their attackers. The incoming fire was landing perilously close to a guard station, and the soldiers, using a high-powered camera, could clearly see the insurgents shooting.

The response from headquarters -- more than 20 miles away -- was terse. Permission denied. Battalion-level officers deemed the insurgents too close to a cluster of mud-brick houses, perhaps with civilians inside.

Although the insurgents stopped firing before anybody was wounded, the troops were left seething.

"This is not how you fight a war, at least not in Kandahar," said a soldier at the outpost who described the incident, which occurred last month, on the condition of anonymity. "We've been handcuffed by our chain of command."

With insurgent attacks increasing across Afghanistan, frustration about rules of engagement is growing among troops, and among some members of Congress. Addressing those concerns will be one of the most complicated initial tasks facing Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the country.

The controversy pits the desire of top military officers to limit civilian casualties, something they regard as an essential part of the overall counterinsurgency campaign, against a widespread feeling among rank-and-file troops that restrictions on air and mortar strikes are placing them at unnecessary risk and allowing Taliban fighters to operate with impunity.

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Petraeus promised to "look very hard" at the rules of engagement. He has since asked Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the top operational commander in Afghanistan, to review the rules. The examination will include discussions with troops around the country, military officials said.

At issue is a tactical directive issued last July by Petraeus's predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, that limits the use of air and mortar strikes against houses unless personnel are in imminent danger. The directive requires troops to take extensive measures, including a 48-hour "pattern of life" analysis with on-the-ground or aerial surveillance, to ensure that civilians are not in a housing compound before ordering an airstrike.

Senior U.S. military officials in Afghanistan and Washington said Petraeus almost certainly will not rescind the directive but instead will issue revised guidance in the coming days in an attempt to streamline procedures and ensure uniformity in how the rules are implemented.

Despite claims from some relatives of military personnel killed in Afghanistan that the directive has limited the ability of troops to defend themselves, the officials said a review by the U.S. military of every combat fatality over the past year has found no evidence that the rules restricted the use of lifesaving firepower.

"We have not found a single situation where a soldier has lost his life because he was not allowed to protect himself," one of the officials said.

If troops are in imminent danger, there is no restriction on the use of airstrikes or mortars. "The rules of engagement provide an absolute right of self-defense," the official said.

The official, like others quoted for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because military regulations limit discussion of rules of engagement.

Differing interpretations

Part of the controversy is rooted in divergent interpretations of the directive. To those atop the chain of command, the restriction has helped reduce civilian casualties, which have been a politically charged issue in Afghanistan and have helped sap popular support for the international military presence. There have been 197 civilian fatalities caused by NATO forces, including U.S. troops, in the 12 months since the directive was issued, compared with 332 in the previous year, according to figures compiled by the NATO command in Kabul.

Although the directive has markedly reduced the bombing of housing compounds, dozens of Afghans continue to die each year in airstrikes on other types of targets, including vehicles.

For troops on the ground, however, the directive has lowered their morale and limited their ability to pursue insurgents. They note that Taliban fighters seem to understand the new rules and have taken to sniping at troops from inside homes or retreating inside houses after staging attacks.

"Minimizing civilian casualties is a fine goal, but should it be the be-all and end-all of the policy?" said a junior Army officer in southern Afghanistan. "If we allow soldiers to die in Afghanistan at the hands of a leader who says, 'We're going to protect civilians rather than soldiers,' what's going to happen on the ground? The soldiers are not going to execute the mission to the best of their ability. They won't put their hearts into the mission. That's the kind of atmosphere we're building."

The principal problem, senior officials say, is that U.S. and allied units across Afghanistan have carried out the directive in ways that are more restrictive than McChrystal intended. Fearful of career-ending sanctions if they violate the order, commanders at every subordinate level down the chain have tightened the rules themselves, often adding their own stipulations to the use of air and mortar strikes.

This spring, the Army brigade to which the soldiers at the outpost near Kandahar belong rescinded authority from on-the-scene commanders to fire mortars or call for air support, except in the most urgent cases of self-defense. Permission now has to be granted by a battalion headquarters -- a requirement not enumerated in the tactical directive that could delay any strike on an enemy.

"Now you have to think like a lawyer when you're getting shot at," the soldier at the outpost said. "It's a case of hesitancy and oversimplification. When you're getting shot at, you don't have a lot of time to build a picture for the guys back at headquarters. Your head is in the ground."

Less than six hours before Marines commenced a major helicopter-borne assault in the town of Marja in February, Rodriguez's headquarters issued an order requiring that his operations center clear any airstrike that was on a housing compound in the area but not sought in self-defense. But before the order was given to the Marines, the British-run regional headquarters in southern Afghanistan amended the language to include any strikes "near" houses, according to two U.S. sources familiar with the incident.

The angst over the directive on airstrikes has been compounded by additional orders on driving -- be polite and don't hog the road -- and escalation-of-force situations, such as when suspicious vehicles approach convoys or entrances to bases. The rules, titled Standard Operating Procedures 373, call for military personnel to "use force for the duration and to the extent required to meet the threat and defeat or neutralize it, but no more." Some soldiers say those orders have also been used in a more draconian and patchwork way than senior commanders intended.

"We have to be absolutely certain that the implementation of the tactical directive and the rules of engagement is even throughout the force, that there are not leaders at certain levels that are perhaps making this more bureaucratic or more restrictive than necessary," Petraeus said at his confirmation hearing.

Permission denied

The tightened rules on airstrikes during the initial days of the Marja operation prompted intense frustration not just among Marines on the ground but for mid-level officers in the combat operations center at their headquarters at Camp Leatherneck.

Within an hour after the first Marines landed in Marja, officers in the command center were watching a live black-and-white video feed from an aerial drone that showed suspicious activity around a cluster of 50-gallon fuel drums within the open courtyard of a house. Marines on the ground also had intelligence that insurgents intended to target approaching U.S. forces with 50-gallon drums filled with homemade explosives and metal fragments.

But when officers at the command asked for permission to strike from the regional command in Kandahar, they were rejected. Too close to the house, they were told.

The Marines proposed targeting the drums at an angle to avoid damaging the house in case, as one officer noted, "they contained baby milk." Again they were denied.

Finally, as the sun rose, a Marine unit began approaching the compound. The frustrated officer, fearful that a detonation would kill the troops, declared the target a case of self-defense. No longer was he required to seek permission.

Three Hellfire missiles were launched at the drums, igniting them into a huge fireball, indicating that they were filled with explosives.

"You can't fight a war like this," the officer growled.