Mountain Tops and Villages: The Strategic Terrain in Afghanistan

There are two essential elements of winning the battles on the ground in Afghanistan: One is the high ground and the other is the villages. The high ground has the traditional tactical advantage and the village is the center of power for the enemy. Some important things to consider about high ground: Allows clear observation of your own forces and the enemy forces Better communication capability among the forces who possess the terrain due to Line of Sight radios Better focus of fires and plunging fires upon the enemy Better concealment during a fight Some important things to consider about a village: It is where the people live It is the source of recruits for the government and the enemy It is where the supply base for the enemy will be It is the center of gravity for winning These are the two strategic areas that must be held in order for us to win. Without holding the high ground we will take casualties from incoming fire and constantly find ourselves fighting uphill. It gives the enemy a place to hide and our risk factor goes way up. The terrain advantage would seem apparent, but this is not always the case. There were three firebases in one river valley that were put directly in the middle of the valley. The enemy couldn't have placed them better themselves. The Taliban had phenomenal unobstructed views of the firebases and could see everything going inside and outside of the HESCOs. The combat posts were probably placed in their initial location because it was an open area that was easily accessible for logistics and convoys. There is a saying in the military that "You can always improve your position." However, sometimes improving your position is moving it. No one should have built those combat locations with so little protection. There were bullet holes in the roofs of the buildings and people were getting hit there all of the time. The mistake made with those positions wasn't locating the firebases there to begin with, but rather improving them and leaving them there. It fits the definition of insanity perfectly -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Soldiers just sat there day after day taking casualties. Just moving the location of the firebases a few meters uphill against a mountain wall completely changes the angle of the attacker and allows for vastly improved protection against enemy fire. However, no one wanted to be the commander to say that the location was bad and admit a mistake. Consequently, the soldiers on the ground took incoming fire daily at the same locations and often took casualties. This problem would likely have been fixed if the battalion or brigade staff had to sleep in one of those locations for just a few days. Another key piece of knowledge about terrain is what sort of firepower you have available. While the mountains can be treacherous or a great opportunity, depending on your position in the fight, using your weapons effectively can make the difference between a position you get shot at constantly and the location of a tactical advantage. One firebase was sitting in a half-bowl of mountains. The Pakistan border was on the back side of the mountains and insurgents were moving through a pass as well as the mountains at night. The ANA had an old D70 howitzer artillery piece that we could not use for indirect fire due to lack of technical expertise. However, it was great for direct fire. Direct fire was simple -- point and shoot. The half-bowl of mountains around the firebase provided an excellent shooting gallery for the D70. Once the D70 was placed in that location, movement across the mountains came to a standstill. Similarly, we had a mortar platoon that could not do indirect fire and it was placed in the middle of a village instead of being used in the narrow river valley to shoot up at the enemy, so we had a useless weapons system in a village that would have been phenomenal in the river valley. Certain weapons systems have an ability to fight "up" better than others and should be purposely used in that capacity. If those weapons aren't available, then positions should not be put at locations where they are vulnerable to the enemy on higher terrain unless absolutely necessary. And if the position needs to be put in a vulnerable location, it should be moved as soon as possible to a more secure site. The village is the most important piece of terrain that exists. The people in the village are who we need to win. Unfortunately, the village is often the least understood place for Americans. Often, regular force commanders station their soldiers outside of a village by 2-3 kms. This leaves the village vulnerable to the enemy at night and the soldiers unable to respond to a problem or support the local police quickly and effectively. Conventional American commanders tend to think of "battlespace" and kinetic operations as something to be planned on large and massive scales with large numbers of units coordinating movement. They are also concerned about risk assessments, packing lists and various other issues including force protection measures. This is a crippling mindset to us winning. The main problem with this mindset is that it lends itself to American units isolating themselves from the people for safety and force protection reasons. We need to be in the villages 24/7 in safehouses with the ANA backing up the ANP when they need it. Providing protection and safety for the people is what will win them over. If the Americans and the ANA spend their time hiding behind HESCOs at night, then we shouldn't blame the people for being so intimidated by the enemy that they refuse to help us find them. They have to be in the village at night with no protection or backup when the bad guys come in to kidnap their family or shoot up their house. The American preoccupation with filling out patrol forms, packing lists, coordinating timelines and submitting everything 24 hours or more in advance is destroying our ability to work with the people in the villages who need quick response to issues as they come up. The leaders on the ground need flexibility and support to win the villages -- not micromanagement. If a trusted source comes to the Americans with good information on bad guys in the area, usually the Americans won't put something together for at least 2-4 hours. By then the intelligence has become history. We need to be in the villages whenever possible and flexible enough to react almost immediately. Running a support base along a road for supply and support purposes is fine, but packing it with hundreds of troops so that a battalion commander can have troops available to him for operations he wants to run is inadvisable. It will give the commander control over his troops, but will lose us the war. We need soldiers out securing neighborhoods and denying the enemy the terrain of the villages and their people. By having forces in the villages we deny the enemy the key terrain of the people. Additionally, anyone who wants to give us information on the bad guys is more capable of passing that. Quite often, we patrol through a village once every 3-4 weeks or maybe 2-3 times each year. If anyone wants to talk to us, they have to come out to our location and that is not good for their safety. The person will be seen going back and forth and will be targeted to be killed. If the bad guys decide to run operations in a village we are running a safehouse, their job becomes exponentially harder. Who are the people on our side going to tell when the Taliban knock on their door? Who is going to come help the people of the village when the Taliban come to collect taxes, demand information or kidnap relatives of people there to hold hostage? Who do the people come to when the ANP are corrupt? Getting into a village and being a part of the day to day operations affords us opportunities to gather vastly more intelligence and take the initiative away from the enemy. The Taliban need to be worried about taking the high ground from us and getting into the villages. This should be difficult for them since we are entrenched in villages and the people are on our side. Instead, we are trying to get into the villages and taking fire from the high ground. We need to change the tactics that we are using. We should give the ANA the lead and operate in support of them. That means doing things their way, not ours. Trying to make the ANA more like us separates them from the villages and mountain tops and pulls them into a firebase with the Americans. This strategy has consistently yielded poor results and lost us ground. We should stop and adjust to something that will allow us to win. *If you enjoyed this article by CPT Thompson be sure to check out his podcast "Winning in Afghanistan"

Mountain Tops and Villages: The Strategic Terrain in Afghanistan

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