I’ve known how to fight all of my life. It’s always seemed natural, and pretty darn simple, to me, yet as I participated in mock battles at the army’s combat training centers, I noticed something unusual. Many of our soldiers overthought strategy. They made things more complicated than they really were or had to be. After the initial fight at my first National Training Center rotation, in 1993, where the army tested us against an opposing force, it dawned on me that war with real guns was really no different than playing Cowboys and Indians with my cousins in our grandfather’s backyard. I had watched it, learned it, from a black-and-white, secondhand Zenith television since I was old enough to remember. Whether it was Hoss Cartwright and his brothers, Tonto and the Lone Ranger, or Marshall Matt Dillon and his sidekick, Festus, the principles of fire and maneuver to gain a position of advantage had not changed much at all over time.
My first battles were fought in the 1970s, on a forty-acre farm in Ranger, Georgia. My team would hunker down behind the woodpile and come up with a plan. “Okay, Jimbo,” my oldest cousin—the alpha male—would instruct, “me and Brian are gonna stand up and throw rocks as fast as we can at ’em. That’ll get their heads down. When they duck for cover you run to that big pine tree over thar, that’un with all them green pinecones under it. Once you’re thar you pile up a bunch of them pinecones and get ready.”
He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me in uncomfortably close to make sure I understood his instructions. Sweat poured off the end of his nose, which was now a mere two inches from mine. “When I holler you start throwing at ’em. They’ll lay down and hide ’cause them ole green pinecones hurt. When they duck fer cover Brian’ll run around on the other side of ’em, behind the well house, and we’ll have ’em surrounded. You got it?” he said with his brow furrowed.
“Yeah. I got it,” I said, knowing I’d better not screw it up. He didn’t like being let down.
It was nothing more than a childhood game to us back then, but in truth it was building a foundation of tactics. Once, I even conducted a one-pony cavalry charge. When I was about eight years old my grandfather bought me a Shetland pony. I named him Sugar Babe, and at that time I was convinced that he was the meanest creature God had put on this earth. He would bite me, kick me, slap me with his tail, and when he had had enough for one day he would make a run for home and no amount of pulling or jerking on the reins would deter him.
About that same time I also acquired a new weapon. I don’t recall how I came by it, but I became the proud owner of a pistol BB gun. It looked just like a six-shooter that John Wayne carried in the movies. With my Daisy lever-action BB gun, and my pistol hanging at my side, I felt invincible.
Since I was the youngest and smallest combatant, my neighbors and cousins allowed me to fight mounted from time to time. On the day of the infamous charge, my friend Jeff Sanford and I fought against his older brother David. David, whom we called Davy, was holed up in a brush pile, and any time we got close he opened fire on us. I got the bright idea to take my Daisy in one hand and my pistol in the other. I held the reins with my teeth like Rooster Cogburn and put the heels to that little pony. I remember feeling like I was a hero. Being the youngest, I always had to prove myself, show everyone that I was just as tough as the older kids. Davy was the oldest kid around, so I was excited to go head-to-head with him. It was the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was in the movies. I felt like a real live cowboy, nobly charging the bad guys’ hideout.
I could not cock the gun while riding. I knew that I had only two shots—one from the pistol and one from the rifle—and I had to make them count. I waited until I could see Davy hiding behind a log in the brush pile, then I brought the six-shooter up and let fly with a BB. Missed.
At that point it dawned on me that I had not practiced mounted marksmanship, a lesson that I put in my kit bag of knowledge. I raised the rifle and shot my one and only BB, which also missed.
Davy, on the other hand, remained behind the cover of the log, waiting until my weapons were empty. Once I was at close range, he calmly rose and took careful aim. I was right on top of him at that point. That was when I felt a cold burning in my chest and a surge of adrenaline.
I pulled hard on the reins, then urged Sugar Babe to turn and run for all he was worth. I tried to make myself as small as possible on that pony’s back. It was no use. It was too late. The tactical blunder was already made. Davy shot me in the right thigh from about fifteen feet. The BB sunk deep into my leg. I squealed in pain and rode away, having lost the fight.
I learned many tactical lessons growing up in those Appalachian foothills. Just as in real war, I learned that logistics are important. We required access to ammunition. Sometimes we wanted a handful of rocks and sometimes, when we really meant business, we wanted big, artillery-size rocks. You could never run out of ammunition. You always needed something to throw at the enemy, particularly if you needed to break contact. I would learn later in life that amateurs discuss tactics, professionals discuss logistics, but I already knew that principle to be true. I had learned it the hard way with my friends in Ranger, Georgia.
We needed to know where the enemy was at all times. I learned the importance of reconnaissance long before I read about it in an army field manual. If we charged the enemy’s position we’d better have a weapon, a stick or a broom handle or something to swing, especially me, the youngest and smallest combatant. If our battlefield extended to the whole farm and we spread out, then we needed to find out where the enemy was, so one of us would climb a tree to get a better view of the battlefield. Over time we learned which positions were best used for observation, which gave us the best cover, and which provided good escape routes in case we found ourselves in a tight spot. Perhaps most important, over time we learned the habits of our enemy; we patterned them. We knew which positions they preferred. We knew who ran the fastest, who had the strongest throwing arm, and who we never wanted to end up fighting hand-to-hand. That simple study of the enemy and the battlefield in the fields of Ranger, Georgia, is exactly what I hoped our intelligence team would do in Afghanistan.
They did not disappoint.
Within a few short weeks, Jillian’s team had gained a good understanding of how the enemy operated. Her analysts studied every document on record, plotted historical fighting positions and escape routes, and pieced together their resupply routes and observation posts. One of the things I’d noticed on our site survey in 2008 was that the maps displayed on the walls of the planning rooms and command posts stopped at the Pakistan border. They simply turned black at the boundary between Afghanistan and Pakistan as if the world ended there. I assumed it was a result of the sensitivity revolving around border violations with Pakistan.
If an aircraft was reported to have penetrated the Pakistan border by so much as a foot we had to conduct an investigation to find out why. Flying into their airspace, no matter how briefly, technically violated Pakistan’s sovereignty. Nevertheless, as soon as we returned from our visit I directed that all of our maps include the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) of western Pakistan. I felt that it was impossible to understand our operational environment without acknowledging and studying how the enemy used the FATA as a means of support and security. We had studied the tactics of the mujahideen, who fought the Soviets on the same terrain. They were masters at using the Afghanistan–Pakistan border to their advantage. Our entire team clearly saw the importance of the FATA and NWFP, so they quickly began studying western Pakistan and its relationship to our operational environment.
Our intelligence team was made up of a diverse group of personalities. Walking into their work area was an interesting experience, to say the least. Clever hand-drawn cartoons were pinned to the walls. Magazines ranging from Muscle & Fitness to Popular Mechanics were strewn about their planning table. And then there were Jillian’s math and statistics textbooks, each carefully marked and highlighted. There was evidence of a unique mix of intellect and fitness throughout the room. Our intelligence professionals were a rare combination of geeky analysts and brawny athletes—scholar-warriors.
Their leader, Jillian Wisniewski, was a country girl from West Virginia—a tomboy who was very competitive by nature. As a little girl she’d run through the Appalachian foothills challenging her brothers at anything from football to Ping-Pong. Extraordinarily bright and gifted, Jillian had been an inquisitive child. She had memorized her favorite book, The Three Little Pigs, by the time she was three and could actually read the words by the time she entered kindergarten. An honor roll student from the start, she had fallen in love with her father’s poetry books at a young age. She “had no idea what any of it meant, but the words and structure fascinated me,” she later recalled. Jillian thrived in both academics and sports—a scholar-athlete, with science and math being her strongest suits.
In a world where kids naturally tend to compartmentalize themselves like TV dinners, Jillian never allowed herself to identify with one specific group. She was neither jock nor geek, neither preppy nor nerdy. Jillian was comfortable with all sorts of people of varying interests, but in reality she preferred small groups, where “I could just be myself.” She was a curious child and the wide-open, mountainous spaces of West Virginia became her laboratory. Looking back years later she pushed her hair out of her eyes, smiled, and said, “I examined bugs, picked plants, tried to build a mini-greenhouse, spent hours outside at night just staring at the stars and trying to figure out how I could figure out my location on earth by using angles from celestial objects to calculate it. I would envision scenarios of changing the tilt of the earth’s axis and imagine what would happen. I would explore old buildings (barns and abandoned old houses) and try to imagine how the people there had lived and what happened to them. I would draw, write, and spend hours just thinking.”1
Both she and her high school sweetheart, Isaac Wisniewski, had applied and were accepted to the United States Military Academy. Upon graduation they were married but soon thereafter geographically separated. Isaac headed to Fort Rucker, where he would learn to fly the Apache helicopter. Jillian traveled to Arizona to train as an intelligence officer. Upon completion of their initial military training courses both were assigned to the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbell. Isaac served in TF Wings during our deployment, while Jillian led our intel team. Jillian’s openness toward people from all walks of life made her a tremendous team builder. Despite being a diverse array of differing personalities, her team attacked every problem with unified purpose and tenacity. Each in their own unique way contributed to the larger purpose of fully understanding the enemy we faced.
Jillian’s noncommissioned officer in charge was Staff Sergeant Jay Karvaski. A good-looking, stout-built, self-proclaimed “street kid,” who grew up in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Jay was tough as nails. His dad had made a living with his hands, installing floors. He taught his son from birth to “be tough” and to take care of himself.
When Jay was about twelve he met a young boy at school who was a boxer. The kid trained at a local gym that catered primarily to professional prize-fighters. Jay’s dad took him to the gym to see if they would be willing to make an exception, to train Jay to fight.
“We don’t train amateurs,” the owner said bluntly. But Jay and his father persisted, and the owner eventually acquiesced.
“Okay, let’s see what you’ve got, kid. Get in the ring and fight,” he said.
Twelve-year-old Jay pulled a set of boxing gloves over his hands as he watched a professional fighter in his mid-twenties step into the ring. For six rounds the man beat on Jay’s face and body. By the end he was a bloody mess.
“You coming back tomorrow, kid?” the owner asked with a smirk on his face.
“Do you think I took that beating for nothing?” Jay replied.
He spent countless hours training and took many more beatings, but soon he began to win. In fact, he went on to win numerous tournaments. Weighing in at 170 pounds, he was a light heavyweight. He made it to the Pennsylvania Golden Gloves State Championships, but there were no light heavyweight contenders, so Jay opted to fight in the heavyweight class and made it to the championship fight before finally losing.
“I wanted to be an airborne Ranger,” Jay later told me.
But the recruiter looked his paperwork over and noticed that Jay’s test scores were high. Above-average scores were required to get into the intelligence field.
The recruiter said, “You should go into military intelligence.”
“I want to be an airborne Ranger,” Jay said, “but before I make a decision, what is the bonus for being a Ranger?”
“Your bonus is your jump pay, one hundred dollars per month,” the recruiter replied.
“One hundred dollars a month! You mean to tell me I am going to jump out of airplanes and I only get one hundred dollars per month? That’s not a bonus. I’m outta here,” Jay said as he started for the door. (“I was a punk kid,” he later said.)
The recruiter convinced him to come back in and reconsider. “What pays the highest bonus?” Jay asked.
“Well, a tank crewman gets an eight-thousand-dollar enlistment bonus,” he said.
“Now that’s a bonus,” Jay replied. “My grandpa was a tanker. I’ll take it,” and with those words Jay Karvaski joined the army.
Jay was assigned to the 1st Infantry Division and stationed in Germany. He fell in love with the army from the start. He participated in the army boxing program, winning multiple championships, and thrived as a tough, gritty soldier.
In 2003 his unit received deployment orders. They were heading to Iraq, which meant countless weeks in the field to prepare for combat, but Jay had also managed to find time to fall in love with a young woman he met in Germany. He was married in August and deployed in September.
Jay experienced horrific fighting throughout his deployment, but one event stuck with him, remains with him to this day. In May 2004 his unit came under a severe mortar attack. Mortars fell for what seemed like hours, but it was certainly no more than a few minutes. Men lay dead and wounded all over the small FOB. “There were eight or nine killed and I think forty-three wounded,” he later recalled. Jay had helped to drag the wounded to cover as steel continued to fall from the sky.
One of the men killed was an infantry captain, a close friend of Jay’s company commander. Jay’s commander felt that their local informant, “Mr. Purple,” was perhaps playing both sides.
It was time to pay Mr. Purple a visit.
Jay served as the company commander’s gunner, so he traveled in the commander’s truck. The first sergeant followed them to the informant’s house with his team as well. They parked on the street in front of the house. Jay’s commander told him to go look in the house with his night vision goggles to see how many people were inside and report whether Mr. Purple was there.
Jay knew Mr. Purple well. He had dealt with him on numerous occasions as information was exchanged, and Jay never felt threatened by him. Jay didn’t really expect anything to happen, which is why he immediately began walking toward a window.
The house sat in a small village about five kilometers outside the city of Ramadi. A full moon provided enough light so that Jay didn’t have to wear his goggles to walk to the house. Jay walked softly and pulled down the night vision goggles so that he could see inside. There he saw a man and a woman asleep on a mattress on the floor.
After a good look into the house, he returned and reported that he had only seen a man and a woman sleeping—after all, it was 2:00 A.M. The company commander decided to see if Mr. Purple was at home.
They knocked on the door, and after a few minutes the informant’s father answered the door. They told him that they wanted to talk to his son. At first he resisted but soon realized that he could either go get his son or the soldiers were going to enter the house and look for him. He chose to wake his son.
Mr. Purple appeared at the door and the company commander began questioning him. He seemed nervous, agitated. “Something just didn’t seem right,” Jay later recalled.
The company commander told him that they were going to take him back to the FOB with them. Mr. Purple asked if he could go back and get his shoes, and turned toward the house. The commander told him no, and fearing that he might try and run, or worse yet, get a weapon, he grabbed Mr. Purple and pulled him away from his home toward one of the trucks. Suddenly, Mr. Purple turned to Jay and grabbed his rifle. He struggled to pull it away from Jay, but he chose poorly.
A jolt of adrenaline shot through Sergeant Jay Karvaski’s veins, and his primal instincts—fight or flee—kicked in. As smooth as glass he dropped to a knee and pulled the butt stock of the rifle back toward himself then squeezed the trigger. The round smashed into Mr. Purple’s face, exploding it at point-blank range. Jay clearly saw the bullet strike him, but he shot the man again before he hit the ground. The image was permanently burned into Jay’s mind like a vivid still frame. It was a horrific sight.
“Damn, did you have to shoot him again?” the first sergeant said.
Years later it still bothered him to talk about it. As he told me the story he shook his head and kept wringing his hands. “I froze and emotion suddenly flooded me. I had killed before, but this was up close and a guy I knew. I just reacted when he tried to take my weapon,” he said. “Then I thought, what have I done? I killed a man.”
Every soldier knows that he might have to take a life, but no amount of preparation or training can prepare someone for the feeling of having killed another human being. Jay was a good Catholic kid. He’d gone to church his entire life. He knew that he’d done what he had to do, but still he questioned. Had he just damned himself to hell at that moment? Emotion consumed him, but he kept it contained inside. He compartmentalized it.
They placed Mr. Purple’s body in the first sergeant’s truck and took him to the local Iraqi police station. When they arrived Jay grasped the informant’s legs as he and a fellow soldier prepared to carry the body to the station. Once out of the truck the other soldier lost his grasp and Mr. Purple fell. His head hit the ground with a soft, mushy sound and his brains splattered all over Jay’s boots and legs. “The sound was terrible. Awful,” Jay said. It was a traumatic sight, an experience that Jay Karvaski would carry with him for the rest of his life.
When Jay returned from Iraq, he and his wife knew they needed to find a way to spend more time together. But since his unit would soon deploy again to Iraq, they spent months on end training in the field. Jay and his wife saw each other only four months during their first two years of marriage. Hoping to save his marriage, Jay searched for options.
The deployment had been very difficult on Jay. The horrific incident with Mr. Purple had been the first of numerous up-close and personal fights with the enemy. Jay had changed in many ways, particularly in how he thought of himself. He was forced to do many things that he could not have imagined himself doing prior to the war. Combat had seemed glorious and heroic in books and movies. He felt good about serving. He loved the camaraderie forged in battle, but the killing was far from glorious. It sickened him, shook him to the core, and made him question his morality. He considered that the best thing to do would be to hang up the uniform and go back to school but ultimately decided that for the sake of his wife, he needed the certainties that the army provided, including a steady paycheck and guaranteed housing.
Reluctantly, Jay remained in the army and changed his specialty to military intelligence. While he wanted to be a frontline soldier, he hoped that the change would save his marriage. He reenlisted for intelligence and was sent to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, for training, but unfortunately, not in time to save his marriage. “That year in Iraq was the worst year of my life,” he said.
Jay was not the first to lose a marriage during the war. He would not be the last. By the end of our deployment my chaplain reported that he was aware of thirty-two marriages that had ended in divorce in our unit alone.
But Jay Karvaski never did anything halfheartedly. He worked hard at school and became a phenomenal military intelligence expert. His first assignment was with our unit, Task Force Pale Horse, and he was a welcome addition to the team. Jay’s in-depth understanding of ground tactics and his experience fighting in Iraq made him an invaluable asset. He gave the team focus, direction, and a firm kick in the butt when they needed it.2
Together, Jillian Wisniewski and Jay Karvaski focused the energy of a very talented team of intel analysts on the problem at hand—the enemy writ large. One of their more popular young analysts, Specialist Jacob Andrews, worked primarily in the operations section, where he had a lot of contact with the pilots, briefing them just before they departed for missions. Andrews was an inquisitive, smart analyst with a sarcastic sense of humor that he easily weaponized, often using it against officers who were incapable of clearly understanding if they had just been insulted or not. He smoked like a chimney, was never the first pick on an athletic team, but possessed an unparalleled passion for understanding the enemy. He loved when the pilots asked him questions about the enemy. He’d beam internally, never visibly, as he went into great detail about what he’d discovered through his study of intelligence sources. Due to his sarcasm and questioning wit, he often suffered the wrath of Staff Sergeant Karvaski, but Andrews proved to be resilient. He was a gem on an all-star team. Collectively, our team knew the enemy as well as the enemy knew themselves.
The collective “enemy” within N2KL was referred to as a “syndicate” because it consisted of an extremist stew of hostile groups including al Qaeda (AQ), the Quetta Shura Taliban (QST), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Tehrik-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), the Salafi Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG), the Haqqani Network (HQN), and others. While these groups had varying long-term aspirations, we quickly discovered that they routinely worked together against their common enemy—us. The term “Taliban” was often used as a universal label for the forces that opposed the coalition and the government of Afghanistan, but that would be disingenuous. For our purposes I will refer to those who fought against us as simply the “enemy.”
The mid-to-high-level leadership and facilitators tended to move back and forth from Pakistan frequently. They collected intelligence on us through local Afghans, who were bribed or otherwise willing to observe and report our movements.
By the spring of 2009, we had observed the following about our foe: the enemy’s decision-making process was driven by simple supply-and-demand and cost-benefit economic models, even though they themselves might not fully realize it. Additionally, the effects of their decisions served to fuel those same economic models. From initial analysis, it was obvious that the enemy had to perform certain tasks in order to conduct attacks on us.
Because it was the most violent area in our battle space, we focused on the Pech River Valley first. We developed a Modus Operandi Template (MOTEMP) for the enemy forces operating in the Pech, which visually portrayed the cyclic and mutually dependent relationship between logistics and direct action. (See Figure 7). The MOTEMP would help us to understand how the enemy operated within our area, thus enabling us to interdict or disrupt their process for attacks.
According to the historical data we gathered, enemy fighters in the Pech constantly monitored and reported our activity. Each day they would rise to the sound of the morning call to prayer. Following prayer they moved to their observation posts. From there they watched everything we did, every move we made, and they reported it to their superiors. As convoys departed our COPs and FOBs, enemy observers counted the number of vehicles and called their leaders. When helicopters took off they reported how many and which direction we flew. Like my cousins and me on the farm, the enemy wanted to know where their adversaries were going and what we were doing at all times. We knew they were watching us but weren’t sure from what vantage points.
When the enemy found a target that they assessed to be weak and vulnerable—a soft target—they moved into a staging phase. The staging phase (green area of Figure 7) allowed the enemy to transition into the direct action phase (red area of Figure 7), which included those immediate actions leading up to and conducting an attack; then, after an attack, they shifted to post-attack planning in order to reorganize and assess their effectiveness. The direct action cells within the Pech River Valley continued this cycle as the supporting logistics cells conducted operations outside this geographic area (yellow area of Figure 7).
Each enemy cell acted according to its own timeline, depending on the type of attack that it typically conducted against our forces (i.e., hasty versus deliberate attacks). Similarly, each phase of its operation followed its own timeline based on availability of resources, external factors, and priority of effort. Pinpointing the individual timelines based on cells and phases was invaluable at the tactical level as it exposed enemy vulnerabilities for coalition forces to exploit; however, knowing the baseline for each of those cells provided insight on where to look first for vulnerabilities.
First, based on the logistics and direct action relationship, the enemy needed to import supplies, which generally came from Pakistan, where they had a base of support. From there, enemy facilitators had to cross the border into Afghanistan, use trails on the east side of the Kunar River, and then cross the river. Then they used trails and valleys on the west side of the Kunar River to get to their staging areas in the Pech River Valley, which concluded the baseline logistics phase from Pakistan to the Pech District.
As they moved into the planning phase, they traveled to the ancillary valleys of the Pech: Watapur, Shuryak, Korengal, and Waygal. These valleys provided safe havens where they maintained caches of weapons and conducted planning meetings. Their planning was done in person since they realized that their communications were compromised. They would then conduct rehearsals and subsequently transition into the execution phase of their operation.
The execution phase began with visual observations in order to choose a vulnerable target. Like a pack of lions surveying gazelles, the enemy looked for the weak and exposed. Once the enemy found the target they wanted to attack they would move to fighting positions, wait for approval from their commanders, attack, and then attempt to coordinate follow-on actions or leave the area. As enemy fighters transitioned into their post-attack phase they again called each other on walkie-talkies or cell phones to try to determine the effects of their operation on both coalition forces and themselves. The enemy needed to know how successful their attack had been and how much damage they had suffered during the attack. They would then meet again to determine any refit needs and to discuss adjustments required for future attacks.
At this point enemy fighters either determined the need for cross-border resupply, or, if the logistics flow was steady, they returned to local caches and safe havens and secured more weapons. During the cell’s decision-making cycle they had to meet to conduct a cost-benefit analysis that determined their next action. For instance, they examined whether the risk of exposing their fighters in the Korengal Valley (Cost 1) and the expenditure of the newly acquired weapons (Cost 2) were worth the potential gain of shooting down a coalition force helicopter (Benefit). The cell then planned, rehearsed, and attempted to execute an ambush, tried to shoot down a helicopter, or attempted to overrun an outpost (Output).
By building an enemy MOTEMP we were able to determine potential enemy vulnerabilities. The most prominent vulnerabilities for the enemy were those locations or tasks that most exposed their fighters and created the most crippling disruption to their operations. In the logistics phase, the vulnerable points included the river crossing. The river was a natural obstacle, had limited crossing points, and flowed through open terrain, which provided excellent visibility for both our ground forces and helicopters. Another obvious vulnerability were their pre-staging locations within the area. If coalition forces exploited those locations, it forced the enemy to use more time-consuming resupply routes from Pakistan, hindering their ability to refit themselves quickly for future operations in the Pech Valley area. Analysis of reporting and focused surveillance and reconnaissance provided insight that allowed us to further refine their vulnerabilities, including time windows for enemy activities and more specific locations.
Jillian’s team laid out all of their research for our pilots. I knew the scouts would love the in-depth analysis. I expected them to ask questions and provide her with a thousand what-if scenarios. I was pretty sure our Apache pilots would do the same, but I wasn’t sure how the Chinook and Black Hawk crews would respond. I was pleasantly surprised. What I quickly realized was that my childhood game of Cowboys and Indians had not been confined to my grandfather’s forty-acre north Georgia farm. I was pleased to discover that my soldiers naturally took to our high-stakes, life-and-death game of what we called “snooping and pooping in bad-guy country.” Thus, I was left to assume that other children had grown up playing their own version of Cowboys and Indians in Midwest cornfields, Southwest deserts, suburbs, cities, and forests all over America and her territories. Soon I noticed that pilots began to drop by the intel shop to talk with analysts, see what new things they had discovered, and if there was a way to become more effective in their collection efforts. We had tapped into something very powerful.
Figure 7 is the raw product that Jillian’s team produced while sitting around a table in the middle of the night. It demonstrates the creative problem-solving capacity of Jillian’s team. Everyone in her shop participated and the result was perfect—problem-solving at its core.
Prior to 2009, the battalion task force responsible for the Pech River Valley also had responsibility for the central Kunar River Valley. It was a massive piece of terrain and a near-impossible task for a single battalion task force. In 2009, Camp Joyce was expanded to provide space for an additional battalion task force in the central Kunar River Valley.
In February 2009, 1-32 Infantry (Task Force Chosin) of the 10th Mountain Division occupied the newly expanded FOB Joyce and assumed responsibility for the central Kunar River Valley, including the AFPAK border. TF Chosin also occupied four other company-size outposts in the central Kunar: Goshta, Fortress, Monti, and Penich. Company outposts versus smaller outposts manned by single platoons of fifteen to twenty men enabled TF Chosin to assemble forces quickly and project them onto the battlefield.
Occupying FOB Joyce put TF Chosin right in the heart of the enemy smuggling and facilitation routes. The primary funding source for enemy fighters came from gem, opium, and timber smuggling. The most active sources of timber were the Korengal and Chowkay valleys. The timber, primarily massive cedar trees, was cut in the back of the valleys, loaded onto trucks, and then transported to a transition point where the trees were strapped to donkeys and moved across the border via trail systems. The AFPAK border was porous, making it extremely difficult to interdict smuggling activities. Afghan border police manned checkpoints at only the most heavily trafficked crossing sites.
The timber was used for expensive furniture, which was built in Pakistan. Timber smuggling resulted in a major loss to Afghanistan’s economy. If managed properly, logging could benefit the Afghan economy, but in 2009, it was clear that unregulated logging would quickly result in erosion and deforestation. Left unchecked, the deforestation would have a devastating effect on the agrarian lifestyle of Afghan citizens who lived in the Kunar Province. Prior to the arrival of TF Chosin, smuggling was essentially an unencumbered practice. Troop strengths simply did not allow for interdiction of smuggling, nor did they prevent munitions from being moved into Afghanistan for enemy fighters. The same trails that were used to move timber east served as infiltration routes for rockets, RPGs, machine guns, and ammunition. The lack of troops in the central Kunar, and along the border, allowed the enemy near complete freedom of maneuver.
By April we began to see the effects of 1-32 Infantry in the central Kunar. Our focused reconnaissance, coupled with their patrols and presence, had clearly disrupted the enemy. Jillian’s team used every piece of intelligence and data available to measure our effectiveness. Rocket attacks that were once prevalent throughout the Pech and Korengal were much less frequent. Outposts on the eastern side of the Kunar, however, saw an increase in rocket and mortar attacks. The enemy was forced to engage us from positions along the Pakistan border because they were unable to transport large munitions west of the Kunar River. The price of weapons had also significantly risen both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, signifying a depletion of their caches in eastern Afghanistan. The enemy no longer had weapons caches and traveling to Pakistan to get them was a difficult and dangerous task, so they tried to buy them from the locals. The locals recognized the demand so they increased the prices.
Working closely with TF Chosin, we had made a significant impact on the enemy’s ability to continue attacks in the Pech and ancillary valleys; thus, we forced the enemy to make difficult choices. If they could not reopen their lines of communication in the central Kunar, they would have to push north or south to try to get around us. We saw an increase in activity and enemy movement to the south in Goshta District and in the north, through Dangam and Nari districts. Attacks against our outposts, which sat on their lines of communication, increased. Enemy forces were willing to fight to try and reopen their support routes. On April 29, Jillian’s team published a 120-day intelligence assessment. In the assessment, her team stated that all intelligence indicated that the enemy would attempt to overrun a newly established outpost in northern Kunar—Bari Ali.