LESSONS ENCOUNTERED

Lamb with Franco
arrangement [that] violated every principle of the unity of command.” Some
U.S. forces reported to the commander of the International Security Assistance
Force in Kabul, others “to a separate U.S. three-star general, who in turn
reported to the four-star commander of Central Command,” and still others to
the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM).
The lack of joint command and control contributed to the inability of the
Army and Air Force, and to some extent the Marine Corps, to adequately cooperate
on the battlefield. 128 Overlapping and ad hoc command arrangements
in Afghanistan also are a major reason SOF worked at cross-purposes with
larger campaign objectives. Kill/capture operations took precedence over the
indirect approach to counterinsurgency, even though there was broad agreement
among the U.S. national security and USSOCOM leadership that the
opposite was necessary. 129 In 2008, a 6-week interagency review found that in
Kandahar Province alone there were 10 separate chains of command managing
10 separate warfighting efforts.
Similarly, before General McChrystal assumed command in Afghanistan
in 2009, he reviewed an incident where Afghan civilians were inadvertently
killed. He found:
There was an Afghan force that had a Marine Special Operations Command
. . . element working with it, which didn’t own the battlespace, but
was out there doing its own thing. There was a Special Forces regional
taskforce, which was also operating in the area, but was different from
the battlespace owner. And then there were the forces that dropped the
bomb which killed the civilians. He found that there were at least five
players in the proximity of the incident, but nobody was in charge. The
different entities didn’t even have the requirement to keep each other
informed of what they were doing. 130
This kind of disunity of command persisted until Secretary Gates ordered
it rectified in the summer of 2010, nearly 9 years after the war started. 131 Gates
considered getting “all American forces (including both special operations and
the Marines) under the U.S. theater commander [and] at last establishing unity
of command,” an accomplishment akin to securing the Holy Grail.
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