Operation Anaconda: America's First Major Battle in Afghanistan

Abstract

Operation Anaconda: America's First Major Battle in Afghanistan by Lester W. Grau and Dodge Billingsley University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 2011 459 pages $39.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Les Grau and Dodge Billingsley offer keen insight in their historical account of Operation Anaconda. Both authors are eminently qualified to write such a book. Les Grau is an Afghanistan expert and has written prolifically about the Soviet-Afghan War. Dodge Billingsley is a daring combat journalist who covered the first Russian-Chechen War of 1994-96 and was on the ground in the Shar-i Kot Valley during Operation Anaconda. This book focuses on the tactical level, much like Grau's earlier work The Bear Went over the Mountain. This poorly planned and executed operation shines a light on the conspicuously regrettable arrogance and ignorance engendered in the Pentagon and US Central Command during the first years of the Afghan War. The detailed anatomy of the March 2002 debacle in the Shard Kot Valley is an enduring testimony to strategic failure of significant magnitude mainly because various officials and planners in the Pentagon did not comprehend or plan for any long-term outcome in Afghanistan or Pakistan. To be certain, in the 2001-02 period, US military thinking, doctrine, and organization were focused almost exclusively on potential adversaries. Ultimately, this book recalls the fundamental risks in engaging in wars without fully understanding the enemy, our own capabilities, and the type of conflict we were about to enter into. The book's beginning includes a cogent quote attributed to Field Marshal William Slim: "preparation for war is an expensive, burdensome business, yet there is one important part of it that costs little--study." This aptly sets the context for Operation Anaconda; there were few people in the US defense community in early 2002 who knew much about Afghanistan or about fighting irregular forces in the Hindu Kush. As a result, the Pentagon and CENTCOM failed to understand and apply the many lessons from the Soviet-Afghan War. The United States undertook the early Afghan War with too few forces and ad hoc and convoluted command and control arrangements. The leadership in the Pentagon mistakenly inferred the Soviets had failed in Afghanistan because they had committed too many forces. A large part of the explanation for the Soviets' failure, however, was that they had too few of the right type of forces, fought with the wrong tactics, and were hamstrung by a convoluted command and control. Anaconda was, to a degree, a metaphor for the first eight years of the war--years that saw forces employing untenable tactics encumbered by ludicrously complicated command and control arrangements. Anaconda violated almost every axiom that students of military art and science learn. It was an ad hoc and poorly planned fight, with terrible interservice coordination, abysmal command and control, and far too few forces. In fact, these forces essentially occupied the enemy's engagement area in a disastrously piecemeal manner. …