Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Bringing air power to bear was a more complex process of coordination than using artillery (itself a skill many battalion and brigade commanders in the Army found tough to master). If an infantry battalion commander spotted a target he wanted artillery to take out, he told his fire support officer, who ensured there were no aircraft due to fly through the space the artillery shells would pass through, made sure no friendly troops were in the area, and then called the artillery unit, gave them the target’s coordinates of the target, and told them to fire the mission. The rounds should hit home within three to five minutes. In the case of close air support the battalion commander’s air liaison officer (an Air Force officer attached to the unit) had to locate an aircraft capable of hitting the target, wait for the air component chain of command to approve the mission, then orient the pilot on to the target using visual reference points like mountains, bridges, or roadways. At lower echelons Air Force enlisted personnel called enlisted tactical air controllers (ETACs) did this. All the ETACs and air liaison officers in a division worked for an Air Force lieutenant colonel who commanded the air support operations squadron collocated at the division’s home base. This officer headed up the air cell in the division headquarters and bore primary responsibility for coordinating all close air support missions through Air Force channels.

  However, there was a significant gap between doctrinal theory and on-the-ground reality when it came to CJTF Mountain. In early November, while 10th Mountain was still at Fort Drum, the Air Force sent Lieutenant Colonel Louis Bochain, the division’s air liaison officer, to K2 to command Task Force Dagger’s fires cell. This left Hagenbeck without his air liaison officer when the Mountain headquarters deployed to K2. Not that it would have mattered if Bochain had still been at Drum, because Central Command denied Hagenbeck’s request to bring his air cell to K2. At least, that was how 10th Mountain told the story. But Bochain said there seemed to be more to it. He noted that LaCamera’s battalion deployed to K2 with an air defense company—hardly a top priority in a war against an enemy with no air force—and that it should have been possible to meet CENTCOM’s force cap requirements by swapping air defenders at K2 for his eight-or nine-person air planning cell cooling their heels at Drum. From early December when Hagenbeck’s headquarters arrived at K2 Bochain tried “daily” to get his team over to join the Mountain staff. But each time he asked, Mountain staffers told him “the force cap guys” wouldn’t allow it. Bochain wasn’t convinced the Mountain staff understood the handicap they would face if they were ordered to fight in Afghanistan without their air planners. “This frustrating bureaucratic bullshit was going on and we’re just trying to convince everybody that you’ve gotta get these guys over here,” Bochain recalled. It never happened. Thus when Hagenbeck moved to Bagram to command and control the U.S. military’s biggest set piece battle in a dozen years, he went without his air cell. If Bochain had still been with Dagger, he could at least have helped his buddies in Mountain out. But several days before serious planning for Anaconda started, he returned to the United States to be with his seriously ill father. This deprived the staffs at Bagram of the officer with the most experience coordinating close air support in Afghanistan as they prepared to fight the biggest battle of the war.

  But this wasn’t clear to Bochain when he left. It appeared to him, as to so many others, that the war was winding down and he wouldn’t be missed. “We hadn’t dropped a bomb in quite a while in support of our ODA teams, a few weeks anyway, and it was sporadic before that,” he said. “After Kabul fell there was very, very little kinetic activity going on.” Bochain and the other Dagger staffers were already writing after-action reports and filling out “the standard paperwork that follows up an operation,” he said.

  In the absence of an air cell, the Mountain and Dagger fires cells put together the broad concept for fire support during the first week of planning at Bagram, assisted by Andy Nocks from CFLCC’s deep operations cell. But once Mikolashek and Franks blessed the concept of operations February 17, Bentley knew they would need an air cell. He called CFLCC headquarters in Kuwait. On the other end of the line was Air Force Major Pete Donnelly, a man of average height and weight with thinning sandy blond hair framing a boyish face. Donnelly was working in the 18th Air Support Operations Group’s Air Combat Center, an Air Force organization that functioned as a link between CFLCC and its Air Force equivalent, the Coalition Forces Air Component Command (CFACC, prounounced “see-fack”) at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Air Base. But in peacetime he worked under Bochain at Fort Drum and was on good terms with Bentley and Bello. Bentley explained why he was calling. He briefly outlined Anaconda, mentioning the operation’s name, and asked if the Air Combat Center could send anyone to stand up an air cell in Bagram. Donnelly passed the request to his boss, Colonel Mike Longoria, and volunteered to lead the mission himself. Longoria agreed, and late February 19 Donnelly and a six-person Air Force team arrived in Bagram to set up an air cell.

  It was apparent to Donnelly that the Army officers planning the operation did not anticipate a major fight that would stress the capabilities of the allied air component. “It was designed as a boots-on-the-ground operation, vice an intense air operation with ground support,” he said. “It definitely wasn’t a top priority [of the planners] to talk to the air planners and discuss what we’re going to need.” Coordination with the Air Force appeared to be done “almost as an afterthought.” Even though Bentley had called Kuwait eleven days before D-Day to request Air Force assistance, Donnelly viewed the Mountain staff’s attitude as one of “Oh by the way, we might need some air support.”

  But to Mountain staffers, Donnelly’s team seemed too small and ill prepared to handle its responsibilities. A Mountain officer said Donnelly, who had spent two weeks at Bochain’s elbow at K2 learning how Dagger’s close air support was arranged, was “a squared-away guy,” but added that the same could not be said for the rest of his cell. “Those guys didn’t really know what was going on,” the officer said. “It was clear to me from talking to the guys…that the crew that was sent to man that C2 [command and control] cell was not very well trained. They didn’t really understand what was going on with the operation.”

  The Mountain staff read Donnelly and his team in on the plan and explained how they proposed to use airpower. The only air strikes they wanted prior to TF Hammer’s arrival in the Fishhook and the Rakkasans’ air assault were against about a dozen targets—mostly DShK machine guns—that threatened the Rakkasans’ landing zones and Zia’s approach from the west. These targets were to be hit while the first wave of air assault troops was in the air between Bagram and the Shahikot. Donnelly proposed a much longer and broader air campaign. He knew the villages on the valley floor were off limits because of the presumed presence of hundreds of civilians. But as D-Day approached and snippets of new intelligence suggested an enemy presence on the high ground above the LZs, Donnelly proposed two days of saturation bombing of the mountaintops and ridgelines that bordered the Shahikot. The Mountain staff rejected this on the grounds that such a bombardment would remove any element of surprise from the operation. “It was a risk they were willing to take,” said an officer close to the debate.

  BUT even as Donnelly pushed unsuccessfully for a massive bombing campaign, others in Bagram sensed reluctance on the part of senior CFACC and CENTCOM generals to permit any but the most limited air strikes. “Anaconda was the third war of three wars in Afghanistan in less than six months,” Bentley said. “The first war was special operators supporting Northern Alliance forces fighting the Taliban and whatever Al Qaida forces there were in there. The second part of the war was sensitive site exploitation, where the Northern Alliance forces sort of stopped. There wasn’t a direct ground-on-ground fight going on anymore.” Anaconda marked the first introduction of large-scale American ground forces into combat. But the rules of engagement and targeting processes had not kept pace with events. They were still geared to pinpoint strikes against fixed targets, not kil
ling large numbers of enemy fighters in close contact with U.S. and allied troops. This meant any targets struck prior to the air assault had to be confirmed by at least two of the three intelligence disciplines: human, signals, or imagery. But it was one thing to know—or strongly suspect—that a mountainside was riddled with caves and camouflaged fighting positions big enough for one or two fighters and maybe a machine gun. It was another to positively identify such positions, even with all the spy planes and satellites the United States brought to bear over the Shahikot. “It would have been great if we were looking at a Soviet motorized rifle regiment or some other large target set, but we were looking at a DShK on a hillside, in the middle of Afghanistan in the middle of the night,” Bello said. “Very, very elusive targets…It really is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

  When the war in Afghanistan began, Lieutenant General Chuck Wald was the CFACC commander, the senior Air Force officer in southwest Asia. Wald flew F-15E Strike Eagles, which have a ground attack role, and he understood the complex business of close air support. But in November, in the middle of the war, the Air Force called Wald back to take a Pentagon job and replaced him with Lieutenant General T. Michael “Buzz” Moseley. “That was mistake one,” said an Air Force officer who served under both men. “You’re changing your key commander during a very complex, never-before-done operation in Afghanistan. And General Wald had done a spectacular job.” Moseley was an F-15C air superiority fighter pilot with little experience in close air support. In this he had much in common with many of his staff, said an Air Force officer who flew missions in Anaconda. “The key staff members didn’t support close air support,” the officer said. Louis Bochain, the officer in charge of arranging close air support for Dagger’s A-teams, disagreed. “I didn’t get that read from General Moseley,” Bochain said. “I had all the authority that I needed to execute the missions that they gave me.”

  The Air Force’s policy of rotating almost all its personnel in the Central Command theater every ninety days meant that neither the staff in Moseley’s Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC, pronounced “kay-ock”) at Prince Sultan Air Base whose job was to coordinate air support for Anaconda nor the pilots who would be flying the missions had been around during the peak of the war against the Taliban. A personality conflict between Mikolashek and Moseley that filtered down to their staffs did not help. “The CFLCC and the CFACC were having trouble communicating because Moseley and Mikolashek did not have a strong working relationship,” an Air Force officer said.

  That Anaconda was coming and would require close air support was no secret to Air Force officials in Saudia Arabia and Kuwait. When Hagenbeck published his operations order for Anaconda February 20, it was sent to Moseley’s headquarters. In addition, said an Air Force officer, “there were e-mails from Mikolashek to Moseley that didn’t generate enough interest.” But according to this officer the real blame for the problems that would hobble the ability of pilots circling the Shahikot to provide effective close air support during the opening days of Anaconda lay with CENTCOM, and in particular with Air Force Lieutenant General Gene Renuart, Franks’ director of operations. “Renuart is asleep at the wheel,” the Air Force officer said. “When big Army gets involved, you’ve gotta get close air support working, and working now, period. General Renuart’s staff didn’t see that this was going to be a close air support fight.” While the staffs exchanged information, none of it trickled down to the pilots. “Those guys are having rock drills at Bagram,” said the Air Force officer. “We, the guys who are going to fly the missions in support of it, aren’t part of it. What the fuck? Over.”

  Word of the impending operation did not filter up to Brigadier General John Corley, the CAOC director, until February 23. CAOC officials felt blind-sided and later complained that it was hard to get any specifics from their counterparts at Bagram about what was expected from the air component.

  Donnelly acknowledged that his team did “very little” communicating with their Air Force chain of command in the run-up to D-Day. They held two video-teleconferences with Longoria in which they described the plan and their “issues” with it, and they got the CAOC to increase the number of planes in the sky over Afghanistan for a five-day period beginning forty-eight hours prior to D-Day. Donnelly asked for increased air coverage to start two days out for two reasons: in case Hagenbeck changed his mind and agreed to Donnelly’s recommendation to conduct forty-eight hours of bombing prior to the air assault, and to have aircraft ready to come to the aid of Blaber’s AFO teams in case they were compromised. The air coverage was scheduled to wind down three days after D-Day “because it was supposed to be a seventy-two-hour operation,” Donnelly said.

  Hagenbeck, Mikolashek, Franks, and Moseley held another video-teleconference February 26. Monitoring the VTC, Wille had his mind put at rest by Moseley. “I was always concerned because we don’t have control over the Air Force guys until that three-star general in the VTC said that all air that they that they had in the AOR [area of responsibility] was prepared to support Anaconda to whatever degree we needed,” Wille said. “Fire support was a big concern of mine. But when I hear a three-star Air Force general say, ‘You’ve got the world,’ then I think things are squared away.”

  Things were not squared away, but Wille was by no means alone in his optimism, which permeated Bagram and the higher echelons of command. Anaconda would be overseen by an ad hoc command and control setup and fought by units weakened by Central Command’s force cap executing a plan that was a product of negotiation and compromise, but confidence was not in short supply in Bagram. “Originally people thought there was anywhere from 150 to 250 Al Qaida sitting right in Serkhankhel, right in the valley,” Wille said. “It didn’t look like it was gonna be that big of a deal.”

  20.

  THERE was still no evidence any of the “big three” high-value targets were hiding in the Shahikot. But in Gardez and Bagram there was a lot of speculation about who was leading the enemy force hunkered in the valley.

  There were reports Jalalluddin Haqqani was still pulling some of the strings in his old stomping grounds around the Shahikot. As a Pushtun warlord who had long been close to the foreign Islamists in Afghanistan, it was to be expected that he was at the very least helping support the force in the Shahikot with logistics, intelligence, and perhaps an outer ring of security. But as analysts worked feverishly to build the intelligence picture, one name was popping up repeatedly in the chatter: Tohir Yuldeshev.

  A skilled organizer and passionate orator, Tohir Abdouhalilovitch Yuldeshev was a radical Islamist from Uzbekistan’s Fergana Valley who had spent the 1990s traveling to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere forging bonds with pan-Islamic jihadi groups. Between 1995 and 1998 he was based in Peshawar, the dusty city in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, where he was supported by Pakistan’s Interservices Intelligence agency, the driving force behind the Taliban. In 1998 he and Juma Namangani, a fellow Islamic militant from his hometown, formed the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, dedicated to the violent overthrow of Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s authoritarian government and its replacement by an Islamic state. Given refuge in Afghanistan by the Taliban, the IMU grew to a multiethnic force of at least 3,000 guerrillas from as far afield as Chechnya to the west and China to the east. It waged jihad across the Central Asian republics and fought for the Taliban against Massoud in Afghanistan. Yuldeshev was the political brains of the IMU. Namangani, a clever and charismatic guerrilla leader, provided its military muscle. When U.S. forces enlisted the Northern Alliance to drive the Taliban from power after September 11, the IMU staunchly defended their hosts. After a U.S. bomb reportedly killed Namangani near Kunduz in November 2001, Yuldeshev was thought to have assumed total control of the organization. As the Taliban was swept aside, IMU forces who survived the punishing bombardments in the north fled to the old mujahideen hideouts of eastern Afghanistan.

  By late February a rough consensus had formed that Yu
ldeshev was the senior enemy figure in the Shahikot. “We had a fairly good idea that Yuldeshev was in there,” said a TF 11 officer. “He was probably in there about a month or two before.” The officer’s analysis was based partly on his “gut feeling” and partly on intercepts of Yuldeshev’s aides “chattering.” However, U.S. SIGINT personnel never heard Yuldeshev himself. He and the other enemy leaders practiced very good communications security. “Those guys are really good,” the officer said. “The senior Al Qaida guys are phenomenal. That’s why it’s so hard [to find them]. They’re just smart in that way.”