Mac-Coleman

11 September 2011

Ten years ago today, I was in the middle of a six month deployment to Incirlik Air Base, Turkey, in support of OPERATION NORTHERN WATCH (ONW). We were flying surveillance, reconnaissance, and fighter sorties to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his air force to attack the Kurds and other minorities in Northern Iraq. OPERATION SOUTHERN WATCH, flown out of Saudi Arabia, was responsible for doing the same thing over Southern Iraq. We had been flying these missions based on the results of DESERT STORM in 1991. It was a good time to use the military as an instrument of national power.

It wasn’t always so. But, the post-Vietnam US military rebuilt itself with the all-volunteer force and new equipment, training, and structure under the aegis of the new Air Land Battle doctrine. It was a resounding success. By 1991, when President Bush responded to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, he had the military force, doctrine, and training to do so. A six-week air campaign followed by a 100 hour sprint of armored and mechanized infantry forces through Kuwait and southern Iraq decimated all enemy forces in their path. The Air Land Battle doctrine and the force built to accomplish it were magnificent. Fortunately for President Clinton, the 1990s presented few military crises that couldn’t be handled with the force and doctrine that he inherited. Even the resolute but peaceful introduction of US military forces to stop the ethnic-driven massacres in Bosnia in the mid-nineties was derived from the doctrinal and force structure that proved so successful in combat just a few years earlier. The conflicts of the nineties were containable based on the force built for the Air Land Battle. Ten years after DESERT STORM, things changed violently.

In the last days of the old order, Turkey was a gorgeous place. The weather on the Mediterranean coast through the summer and fall months was warm days and cool, dry nights. Turkish food is delicious. I had nice quarters, a well-equipped command center from which we ran our operations, and wonderful shopping for rugs, leather, and copper. I bought an embarrassingly high number of Turkish, Persian, and Central Asian rugs. In all, the deployment was the best an airman could hope for. We knew what we were doing, and we did it well.

Our work schedule was intermittent enough to be able to see much of Turkey. The Turks would often shut down our surveillance and reconnaissance communications links, probably so that they could conduct their own attack operations against Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) sites in Iraqi Kurdistan. The PKK was responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Turkey during their independence movement in eastern Turkey. The Turks would ensure that we did not fly for ten days at a time when it suited their purposes. Sometimes, that meant an abrupt stop to ongoing operations. Other times, it was scheduled into our monthly operations calendar. Same operations and goals among allies in NATO? Not hardly. It was a real war for the Turks. We Americans and Brits were playing out the vestiges of DESERT STORM in a comfortable way. Good equipment. Good doctrine. Good training. Life was good.

Ironically, on the late afternoon of 11 September, the ONW senior staff was in a weekly security meeting. We were discussing that we should always send at least two personnel to the commercial airport in nearby Adana to pick up new personnel. After all, it was a prudent security measure. Suddenly, a staff sergeant ran into the room, turned on the television, and ordered all us colonels to watch carefully. We watched the second airliner fly into the second Trade Tower. There were gasps, a few expletives, and then silence. After about three seconds, military instincts kicked in. We followed the time-honored practice to prepare for action, Until Otherwise Directed (UNODIR). We sealed up the base and prepared for the worst. We didn’t know what would come; but, we would be ready to stop the enemy at the fence if we had to. We had the training. We had the motivation. We had the doctrine and the weapons. We thought we were ready.

Fortunately, no terrorist acts were directed at any U.S. personnel or facilities in Turkey. The Turks in the shops around the base actually wore small signs on their shirt pockets telling us they understood our pain and were on our side. Tens of thousands of their countrymen were killed by PKK terrorists in the previous decade. It was a touching display from NATO allies and friends.

Of course, OPERATION NORTHERN WATCH soon ended. The base was quickly converted to supporting the massive airlift of men, materiel, and weapons into Central Asia to attack Al Queada and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Quickly, this new mission became our focus. Our world changed yet again. In painful truth, however, we weren’t ready. We started to fight the new wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq as we had fought the last wars. It wouldn’t be enough.

Ten years of war in Afghanistan. Eight years of war in Iraq. Courageous responses to legitimate threats. Great early operational and tactical successes in conventional military terms. We again destroyed all organized forces arrayed against us in both theaters. The Air Land Battle doctrine and the force applied, despite our greatly reduced numbers since 1991, still seemed valid. And yet, the real war—the strategic war that we didn’t see until too late, didn’t prepare for, and mustn’t lose—finally muted our battlefield success. After the initial destruction of the enemies’ forces, our forces have been ground into the dirt by repeated deployments in lengthy counterinsurgency operations and in unattainable nation-building efforts. We didn't connect the terrorist acts against U.S. embassies and forces in such places as Somalia and Kenya that had accurred between 1991 and 2001with any reason to adjust our military doctrine. We again ended up fighting the wrong war at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

From 2001 until today, we have needed a political/military strategy that would effectively protect the United States’ vital interests from a fundamentalist Islamic war against western civilization. We still do not have that strategy. After all, how can any existing strategy be effective when the current administration will not use terms such as Islamic jihadists, insurgents, terrorists, or anything close to that?

With a coherent and appropriate strategy, we can build and train a force to accomplish the strategy’s objectives. Currently, our forces are not organized, trained, or equipped to fulfill anything but a combination of old missions and ill-focused, crisis requirements. The world changed ten years ago today. Despite the successes of our special operations forces such as Seal Team Six, we have not used the time as we should have. Our forces and their commanders, dedicated and intelligent as they are, have been compelled, using Until Otherwise Directed adjustments, to support faulty strategy. The result has been the death of thousands of Americans—many more than died ten years ago today in Manhattan, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon—with no clear success assured in either theater.

Courageous and smart political leadership is needed more now than ever before to make such sacrifice meaningful. The Islamic jihadist threat is still there. The enemy is still dedicated to our destruction. So far, we have stopped further acts of terrorism against the United States itself; but, that effort is a constant that cannot be eased. To be decisive, to take the fight to the enemy, long a principle of successful warfare, the President must identify the enemy, admit their objectives, and envision a national strategy to defeat them. Subsequently, the President must envision a new military with a new military strategy, new missions, and a new understanding of modern theaters of operations. I don’t see that in our President. We will continue to fight on the defensive as long as we don’t see the enemy correctly. We will continue to be the ones who are attrited. We will continue to respond and react instead of to act deliberately. Nothing is worse for a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine than to be told to hold on Until Otherwise Directed.

One may say that I am callous and do not look at this special day with the required solemnity and reverence for the fallen. I don’t think so. I pray for the families of those murdered on 11 September 2001, and of those killed on the battlefields since then. However, to truly honor those who rushed back into the towers to save their countrymen, to truly honor those who sacrificed their lives by downing their hijacked aircraft in Pennsylvania so that it wouldn’t kill even more people elsewhere, to truly honor those in the Pentagon who were murdered as they served, to truly honor every man and woman in uniform who takes the fight to the enemy in Afghanistan and Iraq, we must do what John McCrae pleads below. He wrote this poem over ninety years ago—in a different war, in a different time; but, all military cemeteries are eternally the same.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

There are appropriate moments to revere and honor the dead. But, I contend that we shall indeed break faith with the dead unless we focus on the fact that we have a foe and that we have a deadly quarrel with that foe. We must prepare ourselves resolutely and then stop that foe from continuing to kill our countrymen and women. Otherwise, our reverent tears will show weakness and not love, fidelity, or honor. And, we eventually shall lose our freedom.