My Share of the Task(188)

                I prioritized ensuring ISAF made careful use of its awesome firepower. But from the start I knew doing so would be sensitive. Resistance would come from both the take-the-gloves-off proponents of more aggressive counter-guerrilla operations, but also from thoughtful commanders and units whose experiences in Iraq were seared into their psyche.

                I would ask soldiers and Marines to demonstrate what we soon termed “courageous restraint”—forgoing fires, particularly artillery and air strikes, when civilian casualties were likely—even if it meant a firefight dragged on longer, or a group of insurgents was allowed to flee only to ambush ISAF forces another day. I was emphatic that fires could and should be used if the survival of our forces was directly threatened, but in cases where the only purpose was to kill insurgents, the protection of civilian lives and property took precedence. To communicate as clearly as I could, I personally wrote the key parts of a tactical directive that was designed to explain my intent in straightforward, nonlawyerly language. I wrote it not to prescribe tactical decisions for sergeants and junior officers closest to the fight, but to help them understand the underlying logic of the approach I was asking them to employ.

                “I expect leaders at all levels to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support (CAS) against residential compounds,” I wrote. “I cannot prescribe the appropriate use of force for every condition that a complex battlefield will produce, so I expect our force to internalize and operate in accordance with my intent.” They were points I reinforced almost daily in commandwide VTCs.

                More important, the directive did not change any part of the soldiers’ rules of engagement—the military’s legal code that governs how and when soldiers can use force when confronted by the enemy. I left untouched the rules by which soldiers could defend themselves. “This directive does not prevent commanders,” I wrote, “from protecting the lives of their men and women as a matter of self-defense where it is determined no other options . . . are available to effectively counter the threat.” I wanted them to think creatively about how they could avoid getting stuck in a situation where, to defend themselves, they needed airpower. But I never took that right away from them.

                Many of the lower-level battalion and brigade commanders had reached these conclusions long before I issued my tactical directive. They had been prudently restricting their use of firepower. Some made it a de facto policy to drop munitions on compounds in only the most dire situations.

                But I also knew that the military coalition was an immense organization, and that there was a constant risk of misunderstanding the directive at the lowest levels, where the fight and these decisions were the most difficult. This was especially true since many lieutenants and sergeants never directly read the directives that top-level commanders, like me, put out; they often received the guidance secondhand. One young Marine, for example, told me that as a lieutenant in Iraq, he learned of new tactical guidance or directives through TV news reports about them. Thus, I used every opportunity, and leveraged the leadership and credibility of combat leaders like Dave Rodriguez and Mike Hall, to articulate the policy. Charlie Flynn, my exec, who quickly grasped the importance, also spread the gospel by answering e-mails from battalion and brigade commanders, many whom he knew, or by talking with them frankly, commander-to-commander, when we visited outposts and regional headquarters.

                My decision to limit fires wasn’t primarily a moral one, although a single visit with a child, staring blankly at where her legs had been, or a widowed spouse, mouth twisted in grief, was enough to convince many people that it was the right thing to do. Rather, mine was a calculation that we could not succeed in the mission I thought President Obama had outlined for Afghanistan without the support of the people. That support was based upon the premise that we were there to protect them—and to support the Afghan government. For many Afghans, we were in their country because their government had asked us to be. Thus, every time we killed or maimed civilians, it not only made us more unwelcome but it corroded the government’s reputation. We needed to curate and grow that reputation in order to make it a bulwark against the insurgency.