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Editor’s Note: The following article draws on themes from the author’s forthcoming book titled US Counterterrorism Operations in Afghanistan: Jackpots, Dry Holes, and Collateral Damage.
Over the next month, the United States will pass two major historical milestones: the five-year anniversary of its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the 25-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. While the latter is likely to receive at least a modicum of respectful remembrance from U.S. leaders and the American public, the former is likely to be ignored by the U.S. government and to escape broader notice.
These are painful milestones. Ones that are easier to let quietly pass by than to engage in the reflection and introspection they demand. I am concerned that we still have not adequately learned and internalized the lessons of the post-9/11 wars. Further, I believe we have engaged in some measure of willful forgetting of these experiences. This should not be our path. Continuing to walk it virtually guarantees that we will remain fixated on tactical military strikes — and the technologies that enable ever more of these at ever greater speeds — at the expense of strategic successes. It doesn’t have to be this way.
In the spirit of remembrance, I will offer three things I’ve learned from 13 years of analyzing the war in Afghanistan as it unfolded, and five years of deep reflection after it ended. First, the United States is impressively capable of tactical and technological military adaptation and innovation. Second, its fixation on these aspects binds it to approaches centered on lethality that were derived from theories of physical systems. And third, such approaches blind the United States to the limitations of these approaches when applied to resilient human networks.
These lessons stem from my study of a single war, but they were visible in other post-9/11 theaters and are clearly playing out in America’s war on Iran in real time — one in which well over 10,000 military strikes have wreaked untold tactical damage but left Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz and the United States looking for expedient off-ramps. These issues are endemic pathologies in American strategic culture. Until and unless they are addressed via comprehensive U.S. government reform, strategic success in our wars is likely to remain elusive.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11, it had a handful of drones, only a fraction of which were armed. America’s intelligence officers and special operations forces had a history of working together within the context of major wars or national crises but did not cooperate in their tactical or operational activities as a matter of course. U.S. officials typically viewed terrorism through the lens of law enforcement, emphasizing the collection of evidence in the wake of terrorist attacks with an intent to prosecute those responsible. Even those U.S. military units that had a dedicated counterterrorism mission spent most of their time conducting training and rehearsals for singular terrorist incidents, such as airplane hijackings or large-scale hostage events. The war in Afghanistan — and the Global War on Terror — changed all of that.
The course of the war in Afghanistan demonstrated that the United States was capable of significant wartime adaptation and innovation. Perhaps the most obvious and visible manifestation of these changes came in the form of drones and, more broadly, the development and application of aerial intelligence collection and surveillance platforms. When President George W. Bush decided to invade Afghanistan, his administration’s strategic review of the American approach to al-Qaeda had only just recommended arming the RQ-1 Predator drone, which was itself a technical innovation that had only been flown for the first time seven years earlier.
Throughout the war, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies armed the Predator, as well as its larger, more capable cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper. It markedly improved these drones’ sensor packages, from a single, forward-looking camera whose field of view was like looking through a soda straw, to advanced wide-angle cameras with cloud-penetrating synthetic aperture radar. The United States also added a variety of other sensors to these drones to intercept a vast swath of communications, and it expanded its drone fleet beyond the Predator and Reaper frames to include the larger and more capable RQ-4 Global Hawk. As a former commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment stated, “When we came [to Afghanistan], we didn’t even know what a [drone] was, and now we deal with those each and every single day.”
The expansion of numbers and types of unmanned (as well as manned) aircraft and space-based satellites enabled the United States to collect massive amounts of intelligence on the activities of individuals in Afghanistan. But such information would be of little utility if it could not be effectively and efficiently analyzed. A second major area of U.S. innovation was, therefore, improvements in its ability to store, process, analyze, and disseminate the intelligence it collected. In this, America was aided greatly by advances in commercial computing technology, which continued to increase roughly exponentially during the war, in line with Moore’s Law. It was also aided by the National Security Agency’s development of the Real Time Regional Gateway, which enabled the “fusion” of geospatial, signals, and other forms of intelligence into a single map display of people (or, more accurately, the electronic devices they carried) of interest.
Such advances continued throughout the war; in its waning years, for example, the United States began using machine learning algorithms to help it predict the time and location of Taliban attacks. These kinds of technological developments — and their continued refinement and advancement — massively increased the capabilities of U.S. agencies to provide the “actionable” intelligence that U.S. military units required to conduct successful raids and drone strikes against enemy targets.
The record of adaptation and innovation in Afghanistan demonstrates an impressive ability of the U.S. military to learn tactical and technological lessons and to apply those in near real-time on the battlefield. The full potential of these technical advances would likely have remained unmet; however, had the U.S. government not also engendered a cultural revolution within its component agencies. Perhaps the most important cultural change — which was advanced by the task force in Afghanistan that was dedicated to counterterrorism but eventually spread broadly across U.S. military forces — was the fusion of intelligence and operations via the targeting cycle known as “Find-Fix-Finish-Exploit-Analyze-Disseminate.” In this cycle, U.S. forces used their intelligence tools to identify targets, raided or conducted drone strikes against those targets, and exploited the information gleaned from those raids or strikes to continue the cycle by generating more targets.
While the basic premise of this cycle dates to at least the Cold War era, the commander of the counterterrorism task force in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gen. (ret.) Stanley McChrystal, has documented how he and his staff learned via their hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq — the necessity for turning that cycle at ever greater speeds. To understand why, picture a bar fight. If one pugilist can throw punches (even moderately well-aimed) at a substantially faster clip than the other, the first fighter is likely to overwhelm the other and win the contest. Through a series of organizational and cultural changes, McChrystal was able to improve the pace of his task force’s raids and strikes from several per week to a sustained pace of 10 or more per night — substantially exceeding the tenfold increase in output often cited by organizational change agents as an indicator of success.
When McChrystal subsequently became the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he advanced a strategy of counterinsurgency, which included a theory of success centered on influence as opposed to attrition. As the theory went, providing security and a modicum of prosperity to local Afghans — thereby winning their “hearts and minds” — would convince them to support the Afghan government instead of the Taliban. Yet, lethal counterterrorism raids and strikes — and a steady stream of them — remained a central pillar of U.S. military operations. When General David Petraeus succeeded McChrystal as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he increased the emphasis on — and pace of — lethal raids and strikes even further, arguing that such actions were a key “part of a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency approach.”
On its face, such a statement appears reasonable. In the U.S. military’s attempts to prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the government of Afghanistan, using raids and drone strikes to attrite the group’s members seems like it should have been a productive element of a counterinsurgency strategy. Thus, for much of the war, the prevailing assumption of the U.S. military was that turning the targeting cycle ever faster — in other words, killing or capturing ever greater numbers of Taliban — would generate strategically beneficial effects.
This belief explains the almost fanatical zeal with which U.S. commanders of the war sought to increase the pace of raids and strikes against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and (later in the war) the Islamic State. As described by a U.S. Navy SEAL: “The one thing I learned from McChrystal was if you can’t get quality, get quantity of missions.” The seemingly logical appeal of this attrition-centered approach, the seductiveness of its simple kill/capture metrics, and the consistent promotion of its practitioners and advocates within the U.S. military cemented the “find, fix, finish…” approach — and more generally, an operational model centered on lethality in overdrive — as the way for the U.S. military to conduct successful operations in the modern age.
As applied against al-Qaeda’s core elements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the find, fix, finish approach was largely successful at substantially diminishing the group’s size and influence. Against the Taliban, however, the combined results of U.S. forces employing similar approaches were decidedly lackluster. That observation begs the question: why was this targeting model effective against al-Qaeda but not, as Petraeus and others assumed it would be, against the Taliban? Answering that question comprehensively requires considering a range of factors; for brevity, I will highlight two here.
The first factor centers on the nature of the groups the United States fought in Afghanistan. For its part, al-Qaeda was a relatively small, hierarchical, and foreign (mostly Arab) force in Afghanistan. While it took the United States 10 years after 9/11 to finally kill the leader of al-Qaeda — Osama bin Laden — and over another decade to eliminate his deputy and then successor (Ayman al-Zawahiri), along the way it killed or captured a significant number of the cadre of leaders just below those two.
The terrorist group’s relatively small size and stratified core structure reduced its resilience to such losses, a point that was reinforced by bin Laden’s own writings and the group’s evolution over time to a more dispersed, “franchise” model. The Taliban did not have this same vulnerability to lethal targeting, largely because the group ranged from 30 to 50 times the size of al-Qaeda, was highly (and deliberately) decentralized, and comprised entirely of Afghans. Over the course of the war, America killed thousands of Taliban commanders and perhaps 10,000 or more of the group’s fighters. At the height of U.S. presence in Afghanistan, it was common for its counterterrorism forces to eliminate entire cells of the Taliban’s fighting structure in a matter of days. And yet, the group’s strength grew almost continuously in proportion to the length of the war, in direct defiance of lethal actions against it.
The second factor centers on two fundamental deficiencies of an operational model centered on lethality. The first of these is that the find, fix, finish model has its origins in theories for optimizing the destruction of physical systems (such as electrical grids or manufacturing networks), which can be effectively modeled because they follow well-understood laws of physics. The assumption that a model based on physical principles will apply equally well to human networks — and that it can yield reliable insights into how those networks might react to the removal of specific individuals via lethal targeting — is a fallacy of the first order. Humans and the interactions between them do not adhere to any analogous set of immutable laws or principles.
A second major deficiency in the model is its exclusive focus on enemy networks. There is a hard-wired assumption in this approach that only effects against the enemy matter, and U.S. intelligence assets and analysis in Afghanistan were therefore laser-focused on al-Qaeda and the Taliban — a fact that some U.S. military intelligence leaders openly admitted (and complained about) during the war. This assumption, however, ignores the impact of lethal actions on non-enemy civilian populations. At various times in Afghanistan, one can find publicly–cited estimates of the so-called “jackpot” rate — meaning the percentage of raids or strikes that netted their intended target — ranging from 50 percent to as high as 95 percent.
In no case, however, was the jackpot rate 100 percent. This meant that throughout the war, U.S. forces were consistently and mistakenly raiding and striking the homes of civilians who had little if anything to do with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. An unknown fraction of those incidents resulted in the death or injury of those civilians, but even in cases in which physical harm did not accrue, those civilians nonetheless carried away at least some degree of mental anguish from having been wrongfully targeted.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military believed that an ever-faster rate of lethal raids and strikes — in line with the find, fix, finish model — would generate predictably crippling effects on its enemies. Had the military instead employed a more holistic operational model that sought a nuanced understanding and analysis of the structure of both the Taliban and Afghanistan’s civilian networks, it might have been able to see in real time what is evident in hindsight: the application of industrial-scale lethal actions against the Taliban, and the consistent drumbeat of civilian harm that accompanied it, was — in contrast to Petraeus’ assertion — counterproductive to U.S. counterinsurgency goals in the war.
The discussion above highlights just a few of a long list of lessons the United States should have learned from its experience in the war in Afghanistan, and a broader list could still be compiled by considering the war in Iraq and Global War on Terror actions in places like Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Philippines, and West Africa. Yet, the points advanced above are particularly salient because they are so evidently echoed in the current U.S. war against Iran.
In that war, America has continued its emphasis on technological innovation with impressive tactical results. It has become increasingly enamored of the use of AI to help it more efficiently analyze intelligence, generate targets, and assess the effects of those targets having been struck. In particular, the MAVEN Smart System — which grew out of Project Maven, an effort that was initially focused on improving lethal counterterrorism targeting — has been increasingly integrated into the U.S. military’s analysis and decision processes, all with the goal of further speeding up the lethal targeting cycle. This enabled U.S. forces to strike well over 1,000 targets in Iran during the war’s first 24 hours, a more than tenfold increase from what it could do before.
The United States has also increasingly integrated the use of unmanned systems into its operations, going well beyond the use of drones for airborne intelligence gathering and limited strike purposes by employing surface drones (e.g., for strike and rescue operations) and underwater drones (e.g., for mine clearing). It has even gone so far as to reverse-engineer Iran’s famous Shahed drones and to use them as a cheap direct-attack munition.
Yet, the U.S. government continues to see the application of lethal military power as the path to victory against Iran. It has struck many thousands of physical targets, including the wholesale sinking of Iran’s conventional navy. Israel, its partner in the war, killed Iran’s supreme leader on the war’s first day and has continued targeting high-level leaders in the Iranian government since then. These operations have resulted in a remarkable degree of destruction within Iran. They have also resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians that we know of and undoubtedly scores more that have not been publicly reported.
And yet, Iran’s government — now led by the son of the slain supreme leader — still stands. As with the Taliban, it is large, entirely comprised of locals, and resilient to decapitation as a result of multiple power centers and many years of preparing for exactly that eventuality. The popular revolution the United States hoped its application of overwhelming lethality would engender did not materialize.
As was the case in Afghanistan, it is difficult to win the “hearts and minds” of people whose neighbors and countrymen are being killed by outsiders. The Iranian government also now controls the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most critical economic maritime corridors in the world; the “best, most powerful, most lethal fighting force the world has ever seen” has been unable to force it open. The harder the United States hits Iran — and the more lethal its approach becomes —the less it seemingly has to show for its efforts. As a former intelligence analyst in Afghanistan described the war against the Taliban, it is “like playing ping-pong against a wall. The harder you slam the ball against the wall, the faster it comes back.”
The overarching lesson that U.S. leaders should learn from our experience of the past 25 years is that dogged pursuit of overwhelming attrition is not a reliable pathway to success, and blind faith in lethality is strategic folly. And yet, the lesson they seem to have actually learned is to employ every technological means available to destroy things and kill people at an ever-faster pace, in the belief that war is little more than “fighting to win.”
The upcoming milestones of the Afghanistan withdrawal and the attacks of 9/11 should be national moments of reflection on their own merits. This year, though, I believe they should be even more than that. These are moments of national crisis, given that we are once again losing a war of our choosing.
Such a crisis cannot be fixed via the usual types of single-agency policy proscriptions — rather, they require comprehensive reforms to the U.S. government that only Congress can bring about, akin to those of Goldwater-Nichols or the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. What is needed is an effort to jump-start such congressional action — something akin to a National Commission on the American Way of War. Such a commission would need to examine a range of issues; minimally, I believe these should include how to balance the U.S. military’s approaches to physical and human systems in war, how to elevate the role of wartime diplomacy, and how to put more emphasis on tools of influence (such as reinvigorating Voice of America or recreating a U.S. Information Agency).
If insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results, the U.S. way of war is nuts. As we approach the milestones of the Afghanistan withdrawal and 9/11, let us pause — really stop and think — and have a national discussion on how we walked ourselves into the asylum of lethality, and how best to get back out.
Jonathan Schroden, Ph.D., is the chief research officer at the CNA Corporation, a not-for-profit, nonpartisan research and analysis organization based in Arlington, Virginia. He is also the author of a forthcoming book titled US Counterterrorism Operations in Afghanistan: Jackpots, Dry Holes, and Collateral Damage. You can find him on LinkedIn.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the CNA Corporation, the Department of the Navy, or the U.S. government.
Image: U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons
