Boots on the Ground

The FOB is counterproductive to the counterinsurgency.
 
By continuing to propagate the concept of Oz's Emerald City, we isolate ourselves from the population and continue to allow the Taliban, al Qaeda, and whoever else is operating in the area to promote their own message and agenda with near total impunity.
 
I'm in the gym every day here on the FOB, and I see the same groups of folks in the gym with me.
 
Based on the PT uniforms, I'm guessing they're Rangers, since if they were SF the shorts would be shorter, and they'd all have shaved their legs.
 
SF guys, don't hate…you're all hairless.
 
I'm sure the Rangers are being used as effectively as they should be in a kinetic application, but my question is this: why are they here? Why are they occupying a huge FOB with a runway, instead of being in a COP/firebase/safehouse somewhere out in the province?
 
Not to disparage them in any way…I know that they bring a ton of good to the fight, but there they are, every day: lifting weights, rather than being out in a village somewhere working with the local population, or providing security for some other unit whose stated role is that kind of interaction.
 
This is the essential point of failure for this counterinsurgency: our isolation from the people we're trying to reach. We cannot, with only a few hours every week interacting with a local population, hope to undermine and turn the tide against an enemy that lives with that same population 24/7.
 
If I'm a villager with a Taliban neighbor, who am I more likely to listen to when the time comes to take any kind of action? The neighbor, or the guy in the MRAP who shows up here for an hour or two maybe every week, if that?
 
MAJ Jim Gant's Tribal Engagement Teams? That's the key to all of this…and if we expanded that to take into account smaller firebases and even safehouses across the country, we'd be engaged with the population on a level that would result in dramatic results in a fairly short period of time.
 
Why won't we do this? Because it could result in more casualties in the near term, and that's not something the administration and senior military leadership is willing to contemplate. Couple that with the unconventional nature of that kind of dispersal of troop concentrations, and it's not something that's going to be the solution on any level any time soon.