The Battle of Wanat

In July of 2008, American paratroopers were building a small base outside the Afghan town of Wanat. They were attacked at dawn and 9 soldiers died. Tom Ricks, the author of Fiasco, has a six-part blog post about what went wrong:

At 4:20 a.m., just before sunrise, volleys of rocket-propelled grenades began to hit the base. There were approximately 200 attackers, according to the Army investigation. They began by concentrating on the American's heavy weapons -- a 120 millimeter mortar, a TOW missile system, and a .50 caliber machine gun. It felt like "about a thousand RPGs at once," Spec. Tyler Hanson later told an Army interviewer. With the first two heavy weapons knocked out, the Taliban moved in to fight just feet away from the Americans, making it difficult to call in air strikes against them. Enemy fighters threw rocks into their Americans' fighting holes, apparently hoping they soldiers would mistake them for grenades and jump out, exposing themselves to fire. Enemy fire was coming from every direction. "The whole time we were thinking we were going to die," said Spec. Chris McKaig.

...It is an interesting case to study especially because of the discrepancy between what is known about the incident and what has been learned from it. In other words, the facts gathered by Col. Mark Johnstone in the Army investigation are compelling, but the conclusions drawn from those facts are not. Rather, the Army appears determined to shy away from the lessons indicated by those facts. Here is what the Army concluded -- basically that we did OK, we should have had a Predator overhead, and that we shouldn't have trusted those lousy Afghans. And then let's talk about how brave our soldiers were.

Read the whole thing. Small fiascoes like this seem to happen alot to the U.S. Army. Not a Good Day to Die, the story of Operation Anaconda, reads like a manual of how not to conduct a military operation:

1) Seize the low ground
2) Don't bring artillery
3) Ignore the tactical intelligence provided by Special Forces soldiers positioned on the very highest ground, above the al Qaeda forces
4) Use a patchwork force composed of 3 different units and 3 different commanders
4) Land a reconaissance patrol right on top of a known enemy position

So while American paratroopers are pinned down in the valley, Delta Force and SEAL teams can see exactly where the fire is coming from, and can call in air strikes to destroy the enemy positions--except for the fact that they have to wait in line behind the pinned down soldiers, whose calls for fire take priority; unfortunately, they are only guessing where the enemy is located.

The crazy thing about Operation Anaconda was that NO U.S. soldier died--UNTIL a general in Florida ordered a helicopter to drop a SEAL team onto a mountain peak known to be occupied by al Qaeda forces.