This week brought the terrible news from Afghanistan that 30 American and seven Afghan service members, along with their Afghan interpreter, had perished when their Chinook helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The dead included members of Army, Air Force and Navy special operations units, with 22 of them being from SEAL Team 6, the unit credited with killing Osama bin Laden.
They were on their way to support a unit of Army Rangers that were engaging the Taliban in the Tangi Valley of Afghanistan’s Wardak Province.
The Tangi Valley is only about 35 miles southwest of Kabul, but militarily it might as well be on another continent. Kabul is under the somewhat tenuous control of the Afghan government, which is supported by U.S. and NATO forces. But Wardak Province and the Tangi Valley are largely controlled by the Taliban. That’s disconcerting, given the area’s proximity to Kabul.
The only U.S. combat outpost in the area had been turned over to Afghan forces fairly recently. The U.S. and Afghan special forces were on a mission to capture a Taliban leader, in an effort to defeat the insurgency by decapitating it. Actions like these are a lot harder to execute if you don’t have a continual presence in the area. These operations depend on precise intelligence and the operational tactics, techniques and procedures that make that kind of intelligence actionable.
The fact that a rocket-propelled grenade was able to hit the Chinook represents a failure to provide adequate threat warning to the helicopter. This tragic incident really shows how difficult it is to provide ironclad intelligence coverage in situations where the enemy doesn’t even know what it will do next. That is why efforts to provide battle commanders with an array of predictive intelligence tools are critical to keeping our service members safe. Many of these efforts are taking place in our backyard, both at Quantico and Fort Belvoir, as well as at other facilities throughout our region.
Although many of these predictive intelligence tools are still on the drawing board, enough have been fielded so that we can take the war to the enemy with a degree of precision not seen in modern warfare until now. On Wednesday, the NATO and U.S. commands in Afghanistan announced that members of the Taliban involved in the Chinook shoot down had been killed. Among the dead were a Taliban leader and the man who fired the rocket-propelled grenade that brought down our valiant service members. I wish the Taliban had received this message before they had that Chinook in their sights.
Cedric Leighton lives in Lorton and is the Founder and President of Cedric Leighton Associates, a Washington area strategic risk and management consultancy.
