re: Retired Green Beret officer: Mattis "left my men to die."

quote:

---

He was a CCT. He had been calling bombs for weeks and apparently for that bomb he decided to use the DAGGR. The bomb was a JDAM, which was a brand new bomb at the time and had special technology used for accuracy, maybe. I don't remember all the details from the book.

---

The story about this incident that is being passed around as a lessons learned talking point is that the JTAC took the batteries out of the DAGGR and replaced them AFTER having added his distance and direction calculations into the device

There are several fire mission modes on the DAGGR (Which is a piece of shite IMO), one of them allows the operator to receive his location, then add a distance and direction to the calculator, and it populates the grid location for the target at the distance and direction calculated.

When he removed the batteries, these calculations disappeared, and he didn't confirm that he was looking at the correct grid before he read off the coordinates. So he read of the friendly location instead. The bomber even told him that was very close to the previously (you tell the bombers your friendly grid one time at the beginning of the fire mission) called friendly grid and the JTAC told him again that the friendly grid was the enemy grid. So the pilot dropped the bomb.

quote:

---

The medevac was extremely dangerous, due to few friendly areas being located by the ODA's position, fuel concerns, and having to fly low over a densely populated area during the middle of the day. Most helicopter missions were done at night. One of the choppers that extracted them out of the area was flying low over Kandahar and had to be refueled midflight. I'm sure this one of Mattis' largest concerns, because if his choppers went down as well, everyone was screwed.

---

I don't even know if Mattis' choppers had mid flight refuel capability. Mid flight refuel procedures.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn't.

quote:

---

It was a very interesting read. The book goes into detail about how Amerine and Karzai, who's a brilliant man, btw, worked tirelessly to rid the Taliban from the area.

---

I have read the book long ago. It's an incredible story. Unfortunately I don't think that mission was the right decision. It was basically pitched to pentagon leaders by a Special Forces Major who was doing a staff rotation to the pentagon. It was a totally off the cuff proposal based around the UW capabilities of Special Forces Command and 5th Special Forces Group.

That missions probably compromised our ability to extract OBL from Afghanistan, and instead focused the majority of our forces and effort in establishing a new government in Afghanistan. This is despite the fact that nobody every claimed that the Taliban government ever had any involvement in 9-11. Essentially, I believe that the Bush Neo-Con admin used 9-11 as an excuse to reshape the middle east at the expense of capturing the senior most AQ member responsible for that attack. Seems pretty stupid to me.

All that being said, the effort of the guys in 5th sFG was outstanding and they achieved their mission with very few losses and in a record amount of time.