Interview with MAJ Robert Stanton

A project of the Combat Studies Institute, the Operational Leadership Experiences interview collection archives firsthand, multi-service accounts from military personnel who planned,

participated in and supported operations in the Global War on Terrorism.

Interview with

MAJ Robert Stanton

Combat Studies Institute Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

Abstract

MAJ Robert Stanton served as company commander with the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry in Kunar Province, Afghanistan during 2006 and 2007 and as an aide de camp at the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters at Regional Command - South (RC-South) during 2009 and 2010, both in support of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). In this January 2010

interview, MAJ Stanton discusses the extreme austerity of the conditions during his first deployment, his unit's ultimately successful mission to stabilize and improve conditions in the

Pech River Valley, and the political nature of his role on the staff at RC-South. MAJ Stanton concludes his interview with the observation, "To see the dynamics of that NATO staff was really frustrating, to be honest. Having spent an inordinate amount of time at the tactical level in

Afghanistan on a very hard, long deployment with a lot of conflict and contact, everything that goes with real combat deployment; to see the infighting and the difficulty and how hard it was to

get anything done."

Interview with MAJ Robert Stanton

10 January 2012

JF: My name is Jenna Fike (JF) and I'm with the Operational Leadership Experiences (OLE) Project at the Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. I'm interviewing MAJ Robert Stanton (RS) on his experiences during Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). Today's date is 10 January 2012 and this is an unclassified interview. Before we begin, if you feel at any time that we're entering classified territory, please couch your response in terms that avoid revealing any classified information, and if classification requirements prevent you from responding, simply say that you're not able to answer. Before we talk about your deployments, could you give a brief history of your background in the Army?

RS: Sure. I joined the Army in 1994 as an enlisted Soldier. I spent about a year and a half on Active Duty and then went to the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point for four years. I graduated in 2000 and was commissioned as an Infantry officer. My first duty assignment was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. I was there after the Basic Course, Ranger School and whatnot at Fort Benning, Georgia. I was at Fort Campbell from about 2001 to 2005. I did the Advanced Course back at Fort Benning and then I went to Fort Drum, New York for the bulk of my captain time. I commanded there and deployed a couple of times from there. I spent a year and a half in graduate school after then, then spent a year and a half at West Point working for the Center for Company Level Leaders teaching cadets. Now I'm here.

JF: When you were prior enlisted, what branch?

RS: Military Intelligence (MI).

JF: Is there any particular reason you didn't commission in that branch?

RS: My goal in that branch wasn't to stay in that branch, in the first place. I was going to be a linguist and I was hoping to make my way into the Special Operations community in an expedited fashion since I'd had some college. When I came into the Army, I came in as a PST because I'd had a year of college already. I never had any intention of staying in the MI branch, I always wanted to make my way into the Infantry or the Special Operations branch.

JF: Before the recording came on, we decided we're going to talk about your two most recent deployments to Afghanistan. When was that first one?

RS: I may get the dates a little wrong, I'm really bad with dates. The first one was in 2006. We deployed in I think March of 2006 to northeast Afghanistan, Kunar Province. We were there for 15 or 16 months.

JF: When you found out about this deployment, did you know it was going to be a 16 month deployment?

RS: No. We kind of hit it at an interesting time. The deployment was a typical 12-month deployment in 2006. That was prior to the surge in Iraq, and at that point in time there was a one-brigade rotation taking place in Afghanistan. Up until then, one brigade would come in and

out every 12 months. They'd go to Regional Command - East (RC-East) and the entire brigade would hold that battle space. We were slated to go RC-East as the other brigade had done, and when we got there we were anticipating a 12-month deployment. I don't remember exactly the time, but I want to say it was about 30-45 days prior to our return, so in about January or February of 2007, when the surge in Iraq was announced, when part of that package was to surge an additional brigade to Afghanistan. We apparently had to make up some time, because although our replacement brigade was already coming in country, there was going to be a second brigade following them. There would then be two brigades in Afghanistan, and in order to make up the difference of when the second brigade could get there, we had to extend. We were the first unit in Afghanistan to extend to a 15-month deployment. Luckily none of my Soldiers had been shipped home yet, but there were other battalions out of the brigade who literally had guys who had already gone home with the advanced echelon (ADVON) and had to turn around, get back on the plane, and come back to Afghanistan.

JF: What unit was this?

RS: This was 3rd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, and I was in the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry, 1-32.

JF: When you were getting ready for the deployment, did you have an idea of what your mission was?

RS: Yeah. We knew we were going to be conducting combat operations in Kunar Province.

We knew where we were going and we had a general idea of how we were going to be operating.

We knew we would be in an area that had seen very little US presence. Our battalion was going to be taking over for a Marine unit, and our battalion had decided to attempt to push out into some of the farther reaches of Afghanistan that hadn't been touched by US forces, so up into north of Kunar Province, into Nuristan, and prior to that there had been no US forces in Nuristan.

We knew that we were going to try to work our way north and establish a larger footprint than previous units had. We knew we'd be conducting combat and counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan.

JF: Knowing what your mission was, did you try to direct any of your pre-deployment training to cover that, or were you guys ready?

RS: We did. We did a lot of cultural training. I know for the officers there was an extensive reading program, which is kind of standard fare, but the reading focused on counterinsurgency, the history of Afghanistan, both militarily and socially, the history of the Pashtun tribes and the history of Nuristan. We did a lot of work to prepare us mentally and culturally for the kind of dispersed operations we were going to be conducting. Other than that, the traditional live-fire exercises were the same. The only other thing that we did that was a little different was we had - - I may be speaking out of turn, but my understanding is that at the time, most units did their mission readiness exercise (MRE) for Afghanistan at the Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC), and brigade commander pushed very hard for us to do our MRE at the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, which is obviously in the desert and the mountains. I guess you could call that somewhat geographically specific. It's the closest thing we had here in the US to mimic the terrain in Afghanistan. My understanding was that when we went through

that rotation, that was one of the first rotations that the NTC had done for Afghanistan-bound units. Beyond that, we trained a little bit to live in a dispersed fashion.

JF: Where in Kunar Province were you?

RS: I was in the Pech River valley in Kunar Province. Kunar runs along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border and it's kind of right here [points to map]. The Pech River valley is one of the main east/west running valleys in Kunar. It's very mountainous terrain, the valley floor is around 3,000 feet and the surrounding mountains are anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 feet. It's sparsely populated and most of the population lives in the different valleys. The Pech valley is the main arterial valley that runs east/west, and the Kunar valley runs north/south right along the border. The Korengal valley, which everyone has heard of, is one of the tributary valleys off of the Pech, it runs north/south off of the Pech. You have the Waygal and the Watapur and some other valleys that we've had significant enemy activity in.

JF: It sounds like this area is somewhat geographically isolated.

RS: It's very geographically isolated. There are two large towns in Kunar; one is Nangarhar and of course you also have Jalalabad, which was part of our battle space. The largest town in Kunar Province is Asadabad, or A-bad. At the time we arrived, there was a small outpost located [looks at map], it's not on your map, but Asadabad was the largest town and if you followed the Pech River farther to the east, there was another large town, and I don't know why I can't remember the name, but it was the location of Camp Blessing. Those were the two primary outposts in Kunar Province when we arrived.

JF: Were there any combat outposts (COPs) or forward operating bases (FOBs) that you were stationed out.

RS: The pseudo-FOB was a COP at Asadabad. When we arrived it was very small. There were some other government agencies that were located there, there was a provincial reconstruction team (PRT) there that was kind of the landowner, and they were strictly a company-sized element.

JF: Were you replacing somebody in theater, or augmenting?

RS: We were replacing a brigade, I can't remember which one. The unit that my battalion replaced was a Marine unit.

JF: Right, you mentioned that. Did you have time for a handoff?

RS: We did.

JF: How did it go?

RS: It was good. The Marines were very capable. They hadn't cracked the code on how to deal with the Pech Valley at the time, so when we took over, that became the primary focus for the battalion. The Pech was that arterial valley running east/west to get into where the bulk of the population was located, the rural population. It was about a 31 kilometer road, and it took the Marines seven and a half to nine hours to drive down it, and they only drove at night, to get to Camp Blessing which was at the back end of the valley. They had a small COP at Camp

Blessing, maybe a company-sized, and then Asadabad was another company outpost with some artillery. The main battalion headquarters was down in Jalalabad. There were really only those two outposts, and they were not the typical and platoon level COPs that you've heard all about.

While we were there, we built a ton of those, 18 or 20, but they didn't exist when we arrived.

JF: You get in, you talk to the Marines, you do a handoff; what did you see as the first order of business? What did you guys need to do first?

RS: We planned a large joint operation with the Marines. The first thing that we wanted to do was establish the Korengal Outpost at the battalion. At this time, I was the battalion assistant operations officer (S3). The Korengal Outpost had not been established, the Korengal Valley hadn't been cleared, but we knew from intelligence reports that the Korengal Valley was part of essentially a migration route for insurgents to make their way down into central Afghanistan.

Our purposes in Kunar initially were to occupy Kunar Province in a way that would limit the insurgents' ability to move into Afghanistan, crossing over from Pakistan, essentially coming over from the northwest. Obviously it was not only Taliban, but insurgents of many different nationalities. They were moving through the Kunar Province and making their way down to Kabul, and that was the threat that we were worried about. The first order of business was to conduct a joint operation with the Marines and establish the Korengal Outpost. That was Operation Mountain Lion, and that was the first major operation that we did in country as a battalion. It was a brigade level operation and our battalion was the main effort, we partnered with the Marines as they were leaving and had other enablers from the brigade. Essentially, we used this operation to get us established in the valley.

JF: It was a successful operation?

RS: It was very successful. The battalion combined an air assault operation with the ground move, down the Pech Valley at night. We landed a large number of troops, company-sized, on the ridge that separates the Korengal from its neighboring valley, which is called the Shuryak Valley. We had one company drive into the Pech River Valley to secure that, one company drive into the Shuryak and climb up over the top of the ridge, and another company along with an element from the Marines air-assaulted into the Korengal Valley to establish the Korengal Outpost. We air-assaulted in, moved all the troops in, and attempted to clear the Korengal Valley and the ridgeline surrounding it of enemy personnel in order to create an environment where could establish the first company-sized outpost in the Korengal. That was successful, as successful as one can be. There was a good amount of contact with enemy forces, and it was primarily all in the Korengal Valley, not the Pech or the Shuryak. We knew that's where the enemy was located. We got the outpost established, and from that operation, the battalion commander realized that he had managed to position his forces into an advantageous array.

JF: By accident?

RS: Yeah, by accident. The plan was to establish the Korengal Outpost and to have a company live there, and have another company based out of the FOB in Asadabad and run the Pech River road. Once the companies that were in the Pech River along the valley floor, that east/west corridor running from Asadabad to Camp Blessing got established, we realized we were getting a lot of intelligence from the local population. We were making a lot of inroads to the local

population, so the battalion commander realized that the best thing for us to do was to stay there.

We slowly began to build small platoon outposts along the Pech Valley and stay there.

JF: Did you get any sense of why all of a sudden the population was so willing to give information?

RS: I think they never really interacted with US forces before.

JF: There had not been a heavy presence there up to this time?

RS: No, there hadn't. The Marine presence was sparse, simply because they didn't have the forces. They based in Jalalabad like we did, and had some small forces in Asadabad, but their mission set, if I remember it correctly, was they were primarily targeting high-value targets (HVTs) in the area. One of those targets was responsible for the shoot-down of a Chinook helicopter in the Shuryak-Korengal Valley in 2004 or 2005. That was the operation where there was a Ranger element up there flying in to rescue some Navy SEALs, and they were shot down and killed. There were some insurgent leaders in the area that were responsible for that and had attained a lot of notoriety in the insurgent movement. The Marines were hunting for those guys, and doing less of what we now consider your doctrinal counterinsurgency effort, and more direct action, developing an intelligence base and going after guys. They didn't spend a lot of time in and amongst the population, they weren't living with the population, they were looking to develop intelligence and doing targeted operations during different times of their deployment to go after bad guys.

JF: I'm trying to figure out how to approach this; I'm wondering if you know if there was any particular event that caused the local population to trust the Americans to start bringing information? Or maybe you don't know this just because that wasn't your level.

RS: There are a couple of pieces. At the time I was a battalion assistant S3, so I wasn't actually on the ground. During Operation Mountain Lion, I was helping the S3 coordinate the operation.

Very soon after Mountain Lion, I took command of Charlie Company, which was the company on the Pech River road. The sense that we got very quickly was that the population was very interested in making a better life for themselves. Up until that point, the only experience they had with American forces was direct action raid operations.

JF: No sense that we were there to help them in any way.

RS: Exactly. Nothing against the previous unit, because their mission was not to do that. Their mission was to go after targeted individuals. Essentially a battalion's worth of guys, 600-plus Soldiers showed up on their doorstep, parked their vehicles and began to go visit them every day.

We drank tea and lived with them. I remember when I took command, I asked the battalion commander, "How long am I going to stay out there?" He just kind of looked at me and said,

"Just pack your rucksack, I'll tell you when it's time to come back."

JF: That told you everything you needed to know.

RS: Yeah, essentially it was, "You just plan to live out of your rucksack until I tell you to move." He didn't want us to create a FOB or a company outpost; he wanted us to live as close to the population as we could and get to know them as well as we could. It just really seemed like

they were very interested in the direction things were going with respect to having us around and being partnered with Afghan forces. They had never had any interaction before. Don't get me wrong, the intelligence was sparse, and it was hard to decipher. That's the way Afghans and Pashtuns operate, they tend to tell you what you want to hear initially until you really get close to them, but the dialogue was open.

JF: That's the important thing, isn't it?

RS: Yeah, it was. Being able to create that connection and open that dialogue with them helped us realize really quickly that if I'm living with the population, then the enemy is probably not living there. The enemy is probably living up in the mountains. One thing that was nice about the Kunar area was that while some of the insurgents were locals, as you find in other parts of Afghanistan -- southern Afghanistan is very much more a local insurgency -- the insurgency in northern Afghanistan at the time was much more one that was dominated by external forces, forces coming across the border into the area, and not necessarily locals. They were facilitated by some of the locals; there were local insurgent commanders, but the bulk of the population were not insurgents. They allowed insurgents to pass through; they would feed them and give them water when there weren't Americans around, simply because that's how the local population survived. The minute we camped out with them, we recognized that if we were there, and the insurgents were, we were creating space that we could then infuse the government into, hopefully get the government of Afghanistan to begin to operate in that province.

JF: Just by your presence, you were keeping the insurgents out.

RS: Exactly, just by being there.

JF: And by doing good things while you were there, you're showing the local population that rather than having to rely on the insurgents for their survival, they could start to rely on --

RS: The Coalition.

JF: Okay. Did you know when you deployed that you were going to be taking command?

RS: I did, but I didn't know when, at what point in time during the deployment.

JF: It sounds like that happened after the battalion commander realized that having a presence along that Pech Valley was very helpful.

RS: Yes.

JF: What was your mission as the commander? You've talked about it a little bit.

RS: [Laughs] That's a good question, and you'd think it would be really easy to answer.

JF: It would be boring if it was. [Laughs]

RS: I don't think we necessarily knew exactly what we were going to do initially. As is the case in such a complex environment as that, that you've never really been to before, you kind of have an idea of what you want to do when you get there. We're going to build the Korengal Outpost, we're going to isolate the enemy, we're going to cut off his lines of communication back to

Pakistan. Then you get on the ground and you realize, this is really complicated. There are all these different tribes and languages. Korengali is not the same as Pashto, no one speaks it. The people in the Pech River Valley hate the Korengalis and we didn't know that because no one had been there before. The mission became, "Okay Rob, I want you to go out into the valley, I want you to take ownership of it because we're going to begin to expand the battalion's footprint to the north. The Pech Valley was the last line of communication that we needed to do that. It was the only road from Asadabad to Camp Blessing. You could either fly to Camp Blessing, and Camp Blessing is at the foot of the Waygal Valley in Nuristan, which again as I said at the beginning, [points at map] goes up like this into Nuristan and the other valley is the Kunar Valley. For us to make our way north to Nuristan, we needed to have control of that. One of the missions was really simple; there's this 31 kilometer road that used to take the Marines seven hours to get down. The road was small and unimproved, you could fit maybe one high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle (HMMWV) on it, and in some places you were rubbing the edge of the well of the tire against a cliff. It was a very treacherous road, so they wanted to make the road safe to ensure that we had a good line of communication, both between Asadabad and Camp Blessing and Asadabad and Korengal. The guys in Korengal were completely isolated;

the only road to get to them was the Pech road, and then you'd hang a left down into the Korengal Valley or keep going into Camp Blessing. We needed the road for a line of communication to Korengal and Camp Blessing, and to facilitate the battalion's movement farther north. We knew we needed the road. That was my initial mission, secure this road. I got that. It very quickly became, how do we connect it to counterinsurgency? How do we separate the enemy from the population? How do we co-opt the population and introduce the legitimate government of Afghanistan into this area, which had never really seen legitimate government presence before? The mission was two-fold; one, secure the road to facilitate the supply line, and two, facilitate the introduction of the Afghan government in the area.

JF: Of those two missions, the first one seems right up your alley.

RS: Sure.

JF: The second one, how did you approach that? You're an Infantry company commander;

politics isn't your forte. How do you do this?

RS: You just get creative. I was very lucky, the battalion commander had assigned me two additional platoons, so I had five platoons. I had three rifle platoons and I had two Delta platoons. Delta platoons are HMMWV mounted; small, 16 guys, but they've got four HMMWVs and are very mobile. Plus I had three rifle platoons which were foot mobile. The very first thing we did was that I broke the road up into five segments. There was no way I can cover 31 kilometers by myself, and also I'm not an expert at public diplomacy or any of that business, as none of us are. I gave each of my platoon leaders a speck of land. I was blessed, I had fantastic platoon leaders who really took to this mission like a duck to water, as they say. I tried to follow the battalion commander's model, where the valley was split into two provincial areas. One of the provinces -- not a province, I'm using the wrong term -- districts maybe. There were two basic districts as divided by the national government, so I partnered with the district governor, and a fellow company commander who was living in Camp Blessing, which was where the other district governor's headquarters, he partnered with the district governor there.

Nangarhar was the name of the town. My district governor had the bulk of the road under his control, but he also had a tribal system that was in place. You typically had the governmental

system from the national government where they had district governors, but you also had tribal leaders with just as much if not more sway over the population, and in this part of Afghanistan, the tribal organization is far more powerful than the government. There were no police forces to speak of, for instance. My first step was to get to know as many of the people and the power- players in the valley as I could find, at the tribal and sheik level and the key governmental representatives. There were two, the police chief and the district governor. Again, the police were un-empowered and a very small police force, and the district governor was also un- empowered because he had very few resources. I got to know them primarily, and my platoon leaders took on the mission of figuring out who all the key tribal leaders were in the different areas along the valley. We began to culturally map out the Pech River Valley to figure out what tribes were there, how far they extended, who were sub-tribal leaders, and who were the key players. Who were the key mullahs, the religious leaders, in the valley, and tried to create a cultural and sociological map of the battle space.

JF: How did you know to do this?

RS: We just kind of figured it out. It seemed like common sense. It sounds funny, but it does.

You go into a new, strange place that you don't know anything about, and what's the first thing you want to do? You want someone who knows something about the place. We knew from intelligence that the bulk of the insurgents were not the local population, but we didn't know how many of them were and how many weren't. We had an idea, but we didn't think that the bulk of the population was on the side of the insurgents. Of course, this is very different from the Korengal Valley where my fellow company commander was, that was all insurgents. The Pech was not that way. In order for us to figure out what we needed to do, we had to figure out who we needed to talk to. It just seemed like the thing to do, figure out who to talk to, and from there, what do the people want, what do they need, and who are they.

JF: About how long did it take you to do this cultural mapping?

RS: The whole time we were there. We never finished. The minute you think you've got something figured out, another village pops up. What was really fascinating about it was that there was a series of towns along the valley floor that depended on the river -- and this is a wide river -- for their livelihood. It's where all the farming was. The valley was very narrow, and the minute you started to go up the valley, you'd find other villages that we didn't even know were there. US forces had never been to them. We'd find these little tiny villages of a couple hundred people with a few acres of terraced farmland at the 5,000 or 7,000 foot mark. The only way people could get up there was by donkey, and we'd just find these places. Then we'd realize that this village is tied to this one down on the valley in this way; it took us all year to do that.

JF: Tribal connections and family connections?

RS: Yeah. I don't even remember it all.

JF: When did you get to a point where you felt that you knew enough of what was going on to start carrying out traditional operations? Or maybe not traditional operations, but the counterinsurgency operations, the other part of what you had to do?

RS: Well, I don't know that we ever got to the point where we were doing anything that I had anticipated doing when we got there.

JF: Did you have anything like a typical day? What were you doing on a day-to-day basis?

Drinking a lot of tea?

RS: Drinking a lot of tea. It probably took us three or four months to get a really good feeling of our own battle space. We spent a lot of time drinking tea, and we spent a lot of time walking up and down the mountains and finding these places, walking into the valleys. There are hundreds of these little villages, and that's just on the Pech. Off of the Pech, you had the Korengal, the Shuryak, the Watapur, the Waygal. These are all valleys that are 30 or 40 kilometers long that wind either up into the mountains or deeper into the mountains. Just when you figured you had the Pech figured out, you realized you hadn't even scratched the surface in the Waygal Valley. I owned all of that battle space; the Pech was the primary battle space, but I owned all of the other valleys off of the Pech except the Korengal. I never had enough time to get into all of them, there was never enough time. I had to focus my efforts on the Pech, and I kind of had to forsake the other valleys. The only other one that I spent a lot of time in was the Shuryak, which is the valley on other side of the ridge from the Korengal. We knewthat was a key strategic link for the enemy. The enemy could make their way into the Korengal Valley to conduct attacks on my fellow company through the Shuryak. We also knew that we had an ally in the tribes in the Shuryak, because the tribes in the Shuryak had a blood feud with the tribes in the Korengal. The Shuryak tribes supported us and the government, and the Korengal tribes did not. I spent a lot of time in Shuryak. These valleys were very long and deep, so to get into the Shuryak would be a six to ten-day operation, just to walk in, get supplies delivered, meet with the people I needed to meet with, and then walk back out. Of course, we were getting attacked the entire time we were there. That was the way life was for us. We would conduct intermittent operations by platoon, so I would always leave two platoons in the Pech Valley, and any day of the week I would be sending a platoon out for four or five days up into the mountains to look for the insurgents, look for caches, follow up on intelligence we were getting. We would get a lot of walk in sources who would come in and say, "Hey look, there's a cache in this area. I can take you to it." That would be a three or four-day operation with a platoon taking off into the mountains by itself.

That was doing my company-level thing; the battalion was obviously gathering intelligence from the two other companies in the area and every month and a half or two months we'd conduct battalion-level operations where one company would be the main effort and the companies were conducting shaping operations. That would require half to three-quarters of my company to either air-assault into the mountains, to climb into the mountains, to go somewhere to try to push the enemy into one direction or another. What we eventually realized we were doing was that we we creating space on the valley floor, and the farther we could reach, the farther we could walk out and set up temporary outposts, we could expand that area where the enemy wouldn't come. The farther we could push the enemy away from the population, the more success we had interacting with the population and introducing government officials to the population. We figured if we could do this and keep expanding these inkblots or oil spots or whatever buzz word you want to call it, we could create the space that we needed to link the local population in the valley with the government. One of the main ways we did this was about three or four months into the deployment, we realized that we needed a road. This became a major aspect of what I did for the next year. There was a road, but it was dirt and at the largest, it was wide enough to hold one HMMWV. We had this idea, and amazingly enough it wasn't just an idea that we had, but the locals had this idea, "If we could have anything we want, we would love to have this road improved. If my daughter falls down the mountain and gets hurt, it's going to take me 10 hours to get to the hospital at Asadabad. I've got to either take her by donkey, I've got to walk, or I've

got to hire one of the very few taxis that run up and down this road and it takes forever." The locals wanted a road, and we wanted a road because it would facilitate our operations as well.

The road in the Pech Valley became the brigade's main project for the rest of our deployment.

Not me personally, but my battle space received the vast majority of reconstruction funds for this road contract. We wrote the contract, I think it was a multi-million dollar contract, to build a two-lane hardball road in the Pech Valley to expand a one-lane dirt road. That became my other main mission, to safeguard the road, to not only safeguard the road itself but safeguard the building of it, and safeguard the contractors. What this did for us is it created a joint purpose between us and the local population. Before it was catch as catch can, but now we had a proper purpose. We shared the same purpose the locals did, and that really endeared us to them. Not only were we living right outside of their villages and in their villages getting to know them, we were doing something with them. Not just doing something for them, we were doing it with them. We trained a local provincial police force to help safeguard the road, we hired security guards from all of the local villages along the road equitably with the help of the district governor and the tribal leaders, so we were able to bring the government of Afghanistan and the tribal leaders all together to figure out who was going to help safeguard the road. All of the labor outside of the heavy equipment was local. We, the government, were employing the local population. We had locals as security guards along the road, digging the ditches, splitting the rock, doing the manual labor to actually build this thing. That really endeared the population to us, to the Afghan forces that we were partnering with, and to the district governor, it really increased his power base. It showed that the government of Afghanistan was actually trying to do something for them. Of course, they probably all knew that we were the money behind it.

JF: In some ways, it doesn't really matter.

RS: In some ways it doesn't matter, because our goal was to separate the people from the enemy and it did that.

JF: The enemy wasn't building that road.

RS: No, they weren't, and they weren't working on it. The population recognized that this was their road. It was employing their kids, their husbands, their brothers, their fathers. This road was employing everybody, and as the road went in markets started to spring up. They were now able to get crops to market, which is a huge problem in Afghanistan, and at that time that was the big thing that we didn't really understand. Most of the farming in Afghanistan is subsistence, but if you can grow enough to feed your family and the rest you can sell, they could never sell it because they couldn't get it to market. Once the road started to go in, smaller markets started to pop up along the road because it facilitated high-speed traffic.

JF: And there were people on the road because of all of those workers.

RS: Exactly. All of a sudden you had markets popping up on the road, and all of these unintended consequences. I mean, I never thought about any of these things. I'm sure someone way smarter than me thought about it, but what we saw was a population enthusiastic about a project that tied the government to multiple tribes and multiple villages along this road. It tied the people to the government, it tied the people to us, and it separated the insurgents from them.

Up until we began to build this road, the Pech River Valley was known as improvised explosive device (IED) Alley. Ninety percent of the Marines who were killed in the unit prior to us were

killed by IEDs along the old road. As the new road began to be put in, we didn't have a single IED detonated on the road that was not -- we had a couple that detonated, but we had already been warned about them. The population had either found them and turned them in, told us they were getting put it, or told us they were already in.

JF: Before they actually hit.

RS: Before they actually hit. The vast majority we found. There was only one catastrophic IED between the time we started to build the road and when we left. That sadly killed some of the Afghans we were partnered with; they didn't have the anti-IED devices that we did. That was the only one, and we knew it was there, we just didn't know exactly where it was. We knew it was in the road, we just hadn't been able to find it yet. It was really amazing to see the population tie into that.

JF: I was just going to say, this must have been an amazing thing to be a part of.

RS: It was. It was really, really neat. We still got attacked regularly, but the enemy, the way they attacked, it wasn't IEDs. It was all direct fire attacks from the mountains. The valley itself is not that wide, maybe as wide as just a few hundred meters, maybe 1,000 in some of the wider points where there had been a washout. There were areas where the valley was extremely steep and very narrow, so you could be up in the mountains shooting down onto the outposts that we were living in. That happened a lot, all the time, almost on a nightly basis when the moon was up, one of the outposts would get attacked. It was always from a distance and we could always fire our mortars. It was rare that we could get to them physically because they would usually attack from the other side of the river. We were separated by the river.

JF: But because the valley was so narrow, it was still close enough they could hit.

RS: It was still plenty close enough to do a lot of damage. What that told us was the enemy wasn't coming into the villages, that they had to stay in the high ground because the population didn't want them there. It didn't always work; there were times when they came down and harassed the locals, and there were some insurgent leaders who kidnapped some of the local population that we had been working with, so there were some bad things that did happen. It wasn't all roses, but for the most part we were successful in keeping the enemy away from the local population along the Pech Valley. As you got farther into the mountains, like I've said previously, it was harder. Maintaining a persistent presence up in the mountains is not easy.

JF: It doesn't sound as if you guys were big enough to do what needed to be done in this area, because of the valleys, because of the mountains, because of the vast area that we're talking about.

RS: No, we couldn't. You had to have an appetite suppressant. You had to realize that we're not going to kill them. We can't kill all the insurgents, and we can't stop them because this is an incredibly mountainous area, there are valleys everywhere, and you can't be everywhere. We chose to focus our efforts on building this road with the local population.

JF: How far along was the road when you left?

RS: It was done.

JF: You finished it?

RS: It was not complete, I'm sorry. When you build a road, there are different steps. We had finished the double bituminous surface treatment (DBST) for the entire route, but we hadn't laid the blacktop across the entire route. You can't ask me what DBST means.

JF: In context I can figure it out.

RS: It's the base layer below the hardtack, gravel combined with some kind of material that holds the dirt and gravel together, so it looks like a blacktop road.

JF: Almost like concrete?

RS: Yeah, it's like concrete, but not as hard. You can chip through it if you have a pickaxe, and it serves as the base layer that you lay the asphalt on top of. We had DBSTd the whole thing and we had asphalted about two-thirds of it when we were replaced.

JF: You said you found out about 45 days before you were supposed to go home that you actually weren't going home.

RS: Right.

JF: How did everybody respond to that?

RS: [Laughs] Not well. That was a pretty bitter pill to swallow. The American Soldier is just an absolutely incredible human. If they believe in what they're doing and have seen the results, you can ask them to do damn near anything and they're going to do it for you. My first sergeant and I went around to each platoon and talked to each platoon individually. I put a net call out the night we found out, it was about 0200, and I got all the platoon leaders on the line and told them what was happening and that I was going to make my way around. I made my way around over the next couple of days and talked to all the platoons. Everyone was frustrated, but when we explained what would happen, that we were surging in Iraq and we were going to be surging another brigade here, and that we had to hold the line until that brigade could get on the ground, they were like, "Alright. Well, let's do it. Let's knock it out and get it done." It was just really an amazing thing to witness, the perseverance of these 20-year-old kids.

JF: In Afghanistan of all places, half of them had probably never even heard of the place.

RS: I can't even begin to describe the living conditions we were in. I actually kind of would like to in a second, because it's another thing that when I look back on it and look at the way the men were living, and then to ask them to do it for two or four more months -- because we didn't know how long we were getting extended for. To see them just say, "Okay."

JF: Talk to me a little bit about the living conditions, I was going to ask you that anyway.

RS: [Laughs] We lived in holes in the ground, basically. I told you before that I didn't know if we were going to be living out among the population when we did the initial planning, we kind of fell into it. When we got there and I established these five outposts along the road, one for each platoon, the central outpost being the company headquarters and one platoon, the guidance was, "You have to be ready to move within a day. You can't dig in. You can dig in, but not

much. There's not going to be hot water, there's no showers, there's no latrines, none of that. No hot food, you're eating meals ready to eat (MREs). You're living out of your rucksack." You had to be able to pack up your rucksack, put it on the back of a HMMWV, and drive away. That was how we lived from when we occupied the ground in March until about October. I would rotate patrols back to Asadabad where there was a shower facility. We'd go back about once a month to take a shower, if we could do that based on the OPTEMPO. That's how we lived. We had HMMWVs, so you would have a cot and you'd set it up next to an armored HMMWV or you'd dig a little ditch in the ground to put the cot in, or you'd set the cot next to a boulder. The Pech Valley is a glaciated valley, so there are lots of boulders, there'd be boulder fields here and there. Where the platoons put their outposts was usually in either a washout area where there were some boulders or they'd put it right back up against a cliff into the mountains. That didn't allow for much digging. We had to be ready to move, so we lived out of our rucksacks and in the dirt. Our uniforms were falling apart, our shoes were falling apart. We began to realize that we were having a lot of success where we were, and moving was probably not a good idea. We needed to stay, so we consolidated down to three outposts. I had two platoons in the east and two platoons in the west, a Delta platoon and a rifle platoon in each, and the company headquarters, myself, smack in the middle of the road. We realized that if we were going to live out like this in the winter we were going to need some shelter. The battalion wanted to give me tents, but I told them no, because tents don't stop bullets, and you can see a tent really easily from 5,000 and shoot AK-47 rounds in plunging fire right through a tent. We'd seen it happen at Korengal where guys were living in tents and getting shot through the tents. I didn't want tents.

We started to request Class 4, building supplies and engineer support. Well, we didn't have any engineers or engineer support. In mid-October, my company outpost got attacked -- this story is going somewhere -- the company outpost got attacked from both sides of the valley. It was a concentrated attack and we got banged up really bad. Several guys got wounded including my first sergeant. Luckily by the grace of God, no one got killed, but it completely pinned down the entire firebase. I had to call in reinforcements from my other two platoons. After that night, we realized -- we had been getting into fights like that a lot, but none had been that concentrated. It was probably 100 guys with heavy weapons -- mortars, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), AK- 47s, Pulemet Kalashnikova Modernizirovanniy (PKMs) -- the whole nine yards, all barreling down on the company headquarters.

JF: They had figured out that you guys were there and not really moving around.

RS: Yeah, and they'd figured out that we weren't protected. Up until that point when we'd get into a firefight, we'd moved our HMMWVs and fought out of the HMMWVs, which had .50 cals on them, plus I had a mortar platoon and some sniper assets, but the [inaudible 52:00] we had couldn't range the enemy. They had pinpointed all of our locations, the attack was so well- coordinated that they hit the company command post (CP), the mortar pit, the company aid station, which they blew up, the first sergeant's truck, my truck, and every position where I had a heavy weapon located, had been pinpointed. They had done their homework. When that happened, the battalion knew I needed some support, and amazingly, literally two days later, all this heavy equipment showed up at my firebase. It wasn't from the battalion, it was actually from the SF team based in Asadabad. He had contracted out all the heavy equipment that had been working on Asadabad and sent it to me, and I had it for a month. The battalion started to push me Hescos and Class 4 plywood, four-by-fours and two-by-fours, and then I had this heavy equipment, a couple of bulldozers and bucket loaders. We dug in. What I did was share the

heavy equipment across the three firebases and for about a month and a half, we built bunkers.

We would dig down into the dirt six to eight feet, a large hole, and then we'd put Hescos around the hole, and use the dirt from the hole to fill the Hescos. Then we would use the plywood, two- by-fours, four-by-fours, six-by-sixes, and eight-by-eights to build the roof. Then we'd pile sandbags on top of the roof in a thickness we hoped would prevent them from getting knocked out by a mortar or an RPG. That's what we did. We built bunkers. It was just Infantrymen, just guys. Maybe one guy had worked on a construction site before so he had some rudimentary knowledge about, if I'm going to frame this bunker, I need to have an eight-by-eight, not a six- by-six or a four-by-four to sustain a plywood roof. No engineers, just Infantrymen digging in with heavy equipment run by some Afghan dude. We built these bunkers.

JF: You could argue they had good motivation.

RS: [Laughs] They had great motivation. Every bunker was different. The company CP was larger, and each one of the platoons dug in their own platoon living space, which was tiny. Some of them you couldn't even stand in. There was one platoon that they build theirs so low to the ground that they had enough room for a cot and to crawl in on your hands and knees and slide in on top of the cot. If you sat up, you'd hit your head on the roof. When my brigade commander came to the outpost and saw guys living like that, the sergeant major literally had to choke back tears because he couldn't believe he had guys there. There were rats in these things, it was horrible. Horrible living conditions, but they didn't care, because they weren't getting shot. The bunkers stopped bullets, and that was great. That's how we lived. We eventually got some engineers to come out and actually certify the bunkers, say, "Yes, they are structurally sound.

They look like crap and I don't know how you're living in them, but they are structurally sound so you can stay." That's how we lived. We never got showers, we eventually got electricity.

The battalion eventually got generators to us because we knew how cold it was going to get in the wintertime. It was a combination of the enemy activity and the realization that we were going to stay there, that we were having a lot of gains staying in these specific positions, and we needed to be able to survive through the winter. We needed something that could retain a little heat, so each one of the firebases got a generator, some portable heaters. It was the 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, so we all knew how to fight in the cold. We also had potbelly gasoline heaters as part of our Modified Table of Organization and Equipment (MTOE) coming out of Fort Drum, which was great. We put those into the bunkers, fired them up, and had some heat. That's how we lived for the next 10 months.

JF: And everybody just did it.

RS: Yeah, they just did it. I'm not saying they liked it, it was pretty miserable, but they made the best of it. It was amazing, because at some point, I couldn't tell you when, you would ask guys, "Hey, do you want to go back to Asadabad for 48 hours, take a shower, clean up?" They'd just look at me like "Sir, I don't want to go anywhere near that place. I want to stay out here with my guys." Because the places they'd built, these little bunkers, became their homes. They were not only living in them, they were fighting from them. The local Afghans would come by and they'd buy a Coke and sit down and have dinner together. They'd created relationships with the local population that was just amazing.

JF: In a million years, did you ever think that you'd see anything like this?

RS: No.

JF: It doesn't even sound like the US Army in 2008.

RS: No, it doesn't. It doesn't sound like the US Army now. We lived in these FOBs in containerized housing units (CHUs) on these big giant bases, and in some places we lived in smaller places, but it was usually inside of a village and you'd have a building. To see a sergeant (E5) shimmy his way up an eight-by-eight pole and hammer some nails into the plywood that's going to hold the roof that's hopefully going to stop a mortar round that's going to land tomorrow night -- I never in my life thought I'd see something like that.

JF: Just from the way you're talking, it sounds like one of the most outstanding experiences you've had.

RS: It was. I'll never forget it. Of all the things I've ever done in the military, being able to be a part of it and watch the way the Soldiers coped with that, I don't know that I'm ever going to see that again.

JF: At the same time, to see the effect that you were having on the local population, and to actually have the effect that you were trying to have.

RS: Yeah. It was incredible. After we came home, a year later, the battalion went back, and I wasn't part of the battalion at the time. Interestingly enough, two of my platoon leaders were company commanders. Both of them had taken command of companies in the battalion, Alpha Company and Bravo Company, Mike Harrison and Sean McQuade. When they got back to Afghanistan roughly 15 months later, in the same area, there were locals that found them. They found out that Mike Harrison was there, and they drove in the middle of the Pech Valley down to Kunar to where Mike was living and visited him. They came from the Pech Valley where they had known Mike Harrison a year and a half or two years earlier to visit him. Sean McQuade hired locals from the Pech Valley to work on his firebase a year and a half after we left. These guys remembered him. Those were the kinds of bonds that these young platoon leaders and these Soldiers had created with the locals. It was amazing to see that. I never thought I'd see it.

It was just incredible, I loved it. It was incredibly hard, incredibly hard. None of these were things I thought I was going to have to do, or was trained to do, or was ready to do. I've never worked on a construction site. It was awesome.

JF: You've talked about so much, I don't know if there's any one thing you could pull out; is there any particular observation or lesson learned from this deployment that you want to talk about? I know, there are so many, I don't even know if this is a fair question. I'm just trying to find a nice way to wrap up this deployment.

RS: We could talk about counterinsurgency, but that's kind of like beating a dead horse.

JF: You've kind of been talking about it the whole time without ever calling it that, I think.

RS: It was interesting because -- we talked about this before you turned the mic on -- living with the population and separating the enemy from the people, that was novel to me. I didn't really understand what I was doing. Now to see it codified as doctrine is pretty neat. To know that there were guys doing it in Afghanistan, and I'm sure there were guys doing it in Iraq, long

before the doctrine was ever written. I guess the lesson learned is that if you give young Soldiers and young leaders the flexibility to figure things out, if you have the intellectual humility as a leader to realize you don't know everything, whether you're a battalion commander, brigade commander or company commander. I can't take credit for that, that was the deployment brigade commander, now BG Nicholson, who taught me that. If you have the intellectual humility to realize that you don't have all the answers, and you are willing to underwrite enough risk to let your junior leaders and Soldiers do what needs to be done. You can take a group of American Soldiers, give them a vague mission, and as long as you resource them, they're going to do things you never could have imagined them being able to do. They're going to solve your problems for you, half the time when you don't even know you have a problem. For me, the biggest lesson that I think I learned -- and I learned a lot of lessons from that deployment -- was that. As I continue in the military and as I see other leaders, you've got to have that intellectual humility, because you don't have all the answers, and you don't need to have them all. You've got some brilliant 21-year-old kid who loves what he's doing and is going to solve your problems for you if you just give him the freedom to do it, and you resource him enough to do it. You make him feel empowered to do it. If you can do that, then the things we can do as an Army are unbelievable. That's what I would say.

JF: Okay. You had a second deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, how did that come about?

RS: When I finished the first deployment with 10th Mountain, I went to New York City for grad school for about a year and a half. About halfway through that, I got a call from my former brigade commander, who was brigade commander on the first deployment that we just discussed.

He was BG Nicholson at this point, and he called and asked if I would be willing to volunteer for another deployment to go back to Afghanistan. He had been told he was going back, but in a capacity that he was surprised about. At the time, Afghanistan was divided into five regional commands. The US was in control of the east and that was the only one we owned. This was early 2008 when he called me and asked me, and the deployment was going to start at the end of the 2008 or January 2009. He had been tagged to be the first senior military officer on the RC- South staff. RC-South as we know now is Helmand, Kandahar, where the real push has been since 2010 for the US effort. He was going to be heading down to be the Deputy Commanding General for RC-South, which was a purely North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters. There was at the most one battalion of US Soldiers, but all the soldiers in RC- South and virtually the entire staff were members of the Coalition, at the time primarily Canadian, Dutch and British. He was going to be heading down there and he was going to be allowed to take about 10 guys with him to install and intersperse throughout the staff, and he called and asked if I wanted to go. I said yes.

JF: What staff position did he envision you in?

RS: He envisioned me initially in an aide de camp role. There were three majors that he brought with him, myself, a guy named Will Daniel and MAJ Fred Tanner. Fred and I are both Infantry guys and Will was an Artillery guy. BG Nicholson envisioned two aides de camp, myself and Fred, and then Will filling his executive officer (XO) role. The way he described it was not like a typical aide, where you manage his schedule, go everywhere with him.

JF: Get coffee.

RS: Yeah, you know. Aides do a lot more than that in today's day and age, they are the eyes and ears for the commander, and they do a lot of administrative things for him as well. Because the staff was small and was a NATO staff, he was only going to have a couple of US trusted agents around him. He wanted us to not only fulfill aide de camp duties but to do other things. Once we got there, Fred became became a traveling aide, I traveled with him half the time and the other half I was his strategic communications representative on the staff. I was basically planning and preparing all of his engagements with anyone who wanted to see him, everyone from your typical meeting folks to your congressional leaders to all of the Afghan leadership and Coalition leadership. The Queen's representative from Britain or whoever was coming from Canada, you name it. Because he was the US guy down there, everyone wanted to talk to him.

JF: This was almost a political post in some ways.

RS: In some ways it was. At the time we didn't realize the repercussions of the assignment, and what we found out after we got on the ground was that somebody somewhere out of the Pentagon or the halls of government had the inclination that the US was going to be committing a significant number of troops to the southern part of Afghanistan at some point, and one of the BG Nicholson's main jobs outside of being deputy commander was to prepare for the arrival of a large influx of US Soldiers into the southern part of Afghanistan. This of course was long before President Obama announced the surge; as a matter of fact, in preparation for that announcement, BG Nicholson and the few members of his US team on the staff got copies of all the white papers that everyone from the Department of Defense to the State Department and the embassy were forwarding for the different options for Afghanistan. We were asked for the perspective from the south and to give feedback. I think he knew when he was heading over there in 2008 that they were looking at doing that, they were looking at increasing the US commitment in the south. Whether they knew it was going to be additional troops, or whether it was just going to be a shifting of forces from RC-East to RC-South, I have no idea. Somebody, somewhere knew that we were going to be putting a lot more US forces down into southern Afghanistan. One of BG Nicholson's main unstated missions was to prepare both the staff and the infrastructure in southern Afghanistan for the arrival of a large number of US Soldiers.

JF: Were you a captain at this time?

RS: I was a captain when I arrived, I got promoted to major in about two months.

JF: As a captain, did you ever think that you would be involved in such high level operations and planning?

RS. No. [Laughs]

JF: What do you think recommended you to BG Nicholson for this position?

RS: He was a fantastic brigade commander, and he had a very close relationship with all of his company commanders across the brigade, of which I was one. Why me? Probably because I didn't have anything else to do because I was in grad school. I was the only person that he brought with him who had ever been to Afghanistan. At the time he got the assignment, before he arrived, he was a one-star general working at the Pentagon in the Armed Forces, Pacific (AFPAC) cell. He was the most senior member of the Pentagon who had ever been to Afghanistan, and he was only a one-star general. Other than a lieutenant colonel, LTC Frank

Sturck [sp.], he was the only member of the Pentagon staff who had commanded a battalion or higher in Afghanistan.

JF: And that was the one he commanded on your last deployment?

RS: Right, that was the brigade. The commitment up to that point had been so small with regard to numbers of units -- one brigade a year -- that you just didn't have a lot of Afghan expertise in the Army at that time. A lot of the commanders had gotten out, and I don't know what happened to the rest of them, they were scattered someplace. They weren't still involved in the Afghan war in 2008 and 2009. BG Nicholson wanted somebody who had actually been on the ground, who had spent a lot of time with the local population, and who knew what the dynamics of the tactical fighting, the tactical operations, in that country were actually like. I had done that for close to 15 months under his command in 2006 and 2007. He wanted some trusted agents around him that he knew personally, but also who had personal experience in Afghanistan at the tactical level, and I was the only one of the trusted agents he had who had actually done that.

JF: Before your expertise in Afghanistan affairs was going to come into play, first you had to deal with the fact that you were in a NATO headquarters. What were some of the challenges of that?

RS: I didn't speak Dutch. [Laughs]

JF: [Laughs] And you still don't.

RS: And I still don't, and I didn't understand a lot of the things the Brits said, although the Canadians were pretty easy to understand. It was a really interesting dynamic, because the first thing you have to do as a young officer, especially a senior captain or junior major who's never been on a staff outside of brigade, is figure out -- we'll talk about this as if it's a division level staff -- getting the feel for how a division level staff works, how it functions, and who is responsible for what. When you overlay on top of that the fact that it's not just a division conducting major combat operations, but essentially it's a division running a quarter of the country, there's all kinds of aspects, things that a staff has to do from the civil-military perspective that I had never experienced, outside of working with some random State Department guy in the mountains of Kunar Province. Probably the biggest dynamic, and this took the longest to figure out, was really understanding the difference between the Canadians and the Dutch and the Australians and the British, which seems like it would be an easy thing.

You easily figure out that they're different, they look different, they sound different, but you don't have a daily battle update brief (BUB), you have minutes or something weird. Coffee is a meeting. Understanding the dynamics that the other nations' national interests played on the members of the staff, and even on the units that were actually fighting in Afghanistan. We kind of take it for granted that as you go into a place to do operations as a member of the American military, you're pretty autonomous with regard to the fact that you have a mission statement, guidance and commander's intent, and that commander's intent comes from another guy wearing the uniform who outranks you, and he has commander's intent that comes from another guy wearing the uniform who outranks him and so on and so forth up the chain until you hit the boss, a two-, three- or four-star general. In Afghanistan at the time, it was a US four-star general. For the other nations, it wasn't that clear-cut, and that's not something that I expected. I think BG Nicholson had an inclination that it was going to be like that, but to see national interests from

other countries affect the way brigade level units operated and the way that commanders made decisions on the ground was very strange. How it played out on the staff was almost like a game of chess. You couldn't just walk across the hall and talk to the guy from the Netherlands about something that you thought we should be doing in the Oruzgan Province, because the Dutch owned that province within RC-South, without understanding why his nation wanted him to be there, what the national priorities were, what the brigade commander's up there were told what they could and couldn't do by their national government. You couldn't just assume that because the RC-South commander, who at the time was Dutch, told the commander of Helmand Province who was British that he wanted something done that the British commander was going to do it the exact same way that the Dutch commander wanted him to do it. The British commander had another guy that he had to report to who wasn't even in Afghanistan, he was in Great Britain.

Not that we would operate any differently if a Dutch commander told BG Nicholson to do something; he would still have guidance through the US chain of command that he would follow.

I had never seen that play out at the tactical level before, and I'd never had to understand how that impacted staff planning at that level.

JF: It sounds like what you're saying is that any US national interests are worked out at a higher level so that by the time the planning gets down to your level, any national interests are already being considered.

RS: Yes, to a degree. That's a good way to put it.

JF: It sounds like you're saying with some other countries, those interests or factors aren't necessarily being worked out at a higher level, they're being drilled down to people right there on the ground in Afghanistan, and they're having to make decisions that maybe have already been made for you.

RS: Correct.

JF: Does that sound about right?

RS: It does. The other piece is that when you talk about that kind of decision chain, there's a level of separation that exists in other countries that participate in Afghanistan, and that level of separation is very great. That level of separation is less great for the US. Let me try to explain, because I'm not making a lot of sense.

JF: It's a complicated issue.

RS: If you were to get away from a tactical operation such as, "I'm going to go after this bad guy and kick in that door." That's the same across the board. It gets really confusing and muddled when you start talking about dealing with specific Afghan personalities within the government.

Provincial leaders, for instance, the governor of Kandahar, or the governor of some other province. What you have is in our world, a brigade commander may not have complete freedom to do what he wants to in the specific battle space with regard to the Afghan government, but he has a one-star general at the division level he can reach out and touch, and the one-star has a two- star, and the two-star has a three-star, and those guys are all in Afghanistan. They all have a really good sense of what's going on. From another nation's perspective, when you don't have the multiple levels of senior leaders at the military level, the bellybutton that you have to push to

get permission to do something isn't the one-star above you, it's the guy wearing a suit and a tie in Canada.

JF: At the Parliament building or whatever.

RS: At the Parliament building, right, or in Great Britain, or in the Netherlands. There is separation between the understanding that those guys have and what's actually happening on the ground. That separation is much greater than what it is in the US military, which complicates the planning and the execution. It complicates the whole mess.

JF: To put it in technical terms. [Laughs]

RS: [Laughs] Right. It makes things much more difficult.

JF: And that was something you had not necessarily been expecting. How long did it take you, first, to figure out that it was there, and second, to figure out how to work with that?

RS: Probably a couple of months to really get a sense for it. You see it, but you don't realize how it's having an impact until you actually see it have an impact in a specific situation. You're like, "Wait a second, why don't you guys just do this? That's what you should do. It makes perfect sense." And they can't, and they don't. You realize the reason that they're not doing that is because they aren't allowed to, and they were told they couldn't by somebody who's not even in the country.

JF: We all have a tendency to mirror image, and we look at another military and assume that it's organized --

RS: Just like us.

JF: Fundamentally like ours. It took a while to recognize that it wasn't.

RS: Or, they're fundamentally organized like us, but they're so much smaller that the national interests of those countries have a lot more sway over the decisions that the guys can make on the ground. Another real simple example that's very well-publicized is the notion of national caveats. You can equate them to rules of engagement (ROE). They dictate on a national level what a country's military forces can and cannot do. I'm going to make up an example; if you're in the Canadian military and you're Kandahar, you cannot conduct night operations in the city because the national caveat says, "Our forces will not conduct night operations in the city."

JF: That's a completely fictional example.

RS: Yes.

JF: That's going to affect what the NATO commander can ask the Canadians to do, on a day-to- day or an operations basis.

RS: Exactly.

JF: You on the staff have to know what each nation's caveats are in order to be able to plan operations.