Flying back to the United States, Wisdom realized his research was leading him in an entirely different direction. There was no question that the soldiers reacted heroically under fire. But Wisdom questioned the thinking behind the entire mission.
When he returned to the United States, he began discussing the mission with several historians at United States Special Operations Command among others. He sought their input and perspective. What he found was disturbing. Reviewing the information—and everything he knew from all his years in the military—he realized that Operation Commando Wrath was more than a failed mission. It represented many of the operational failures in Afghanistan.
You had a special operations community “hell-bent to validate this whole man-hunting concept.” Even though it had never been shown to be effective, the military’s infatuation with network analysis and net-centric warfare had become part of the eventual replacement of sound operations and tactics.
The mission had had a high potential for aircraft full of troops going down. The Green Berets were extracted because of aircrews that were willing to assume an extraordinarily high degree of risk. When you’re an infantryman, you can get down the rocks. You can’t do that in a Chinook. You can’t do that in a Black Hawk. They still have a lot of weight and balance issues. The air quality definitely affects Apaches and Black Hawks.
At the command level, it was believed that the mission had been planned out meticulously. But one question Wisdom was unable to answer was: Who pushed this plan? He knew Walton’s team was given the plan but had little input into its details. Planning is a critical part of any operation—and plans have to be approved down the line. You develop a plan and it has to be approved from above until it reaches the final “seven or eight guys who are going to execute it.”
As a student of history, Wisdom knew that this was an issue in Special Forces. Traditionally in Special Forces, especially in the 1950s and well into the 1960s, SF teams, had large companies commanded by lieutenant colonels. You had companies and teams, and the teams were often out in the middle of nowhere. The teams would develop their own plans and execute them, and they would resource them all the way back to the top so they had aircraft and air cover and air support.
The Green Berets were independent operators in many ways. By the 1970s, the Regular Army wanted little to do with Special Forces. The Army didn’t want anything to do with counterinsurgency warfare. These were simply not discussed, not talked about in the Regular Army.
“In fact, Special Forces practically went away,” Wisdom recalled. “It was on life support. There was a lot of resentment toward Special Forces in Vietnam as well as [toward] Army aviation. Those were the only two branches that came out with their heads held high.”
So Wisdom watched the shift from the Vietnam-era concept of Special Forces—according to which Green Berets lived in the boonies and worked with host-nation forces and tribes—to a more conventional unit.
Wisdom noticed just how conventionalized Special Forces had become in Afghanistan. In his view, Operation Commando Wrath illustrated this change. The mission was a conventional operation. Just because it was led by Special Forces didn’t make it a special operation. He concluded: It was an operation that a good infantry company could have handled.
Fortified with his information, he wanted to write a report that could stand for twenty years—the military could learn from its mistakes.
To do that, he needed to collect more information, and to his surprise, it came from unlikely sources. Many NCOs and officers who knew he was writing the report started slipping him information “under the table.” To Wisdom, this was another indication that there was more to Commando Wrath than just a fight that went bad. Fights do go bad, he knew. Some days you get the bear and some days the bear gets you. But here he had soldiers giving him material that no one else had been willing to turn over. It was always: “Hey, you need to look at this.”
He had to put together a time line, which he did in part by listening to the radio traffic.
One of the problems with Commando Wrath—and it helped illustrate the many problems in the war—was that many of the operations were driven by sources. Everyone seemed to be running their own sources. Even Grandma has her own network, he thought. So who was working for whom? How much circular reporting was going around? With Commando Wrath, they had a source telling them Haji Ghafour was in the Shok Valley and that, for the most part, he could be easily taken.
Easily taken? That was flat-out wrong—and it was something he would hint at in his report.