Slowly, Carefully
Now they go to the mountains, where they will rely on their strengths.

By Cmdr. Robert E. Stumpf, USN (Ret.), who served as a carrier air-wing strike leader throughout Desert Storm and commanded a Fleet F/A-18 Squadron and the Blue Angels.
October 11, 2001 11:25 a.m.

he apparent success of coalition air strikes against Taliban military targets is gratifying and reflects the effectiveness of our high-tech airborne weapon systems. At the same time, it is enlightening to consider the circumspect comments of Secretary Rumsfeld when describing these operations. As he carefully explains, coalition-limited air strikes against Taliban military targets are designed not as victories in themselves, but only as tools to achieving more difficult objectives. While it is premature to predict the eventual outcome of a conflict at this early stage, Rumsfeld correctly recognizes the possibility that, after all the "high value" targets are destroyed, the enemy soldiers who remain will constitute a highly formidable force indeed. Taliban and al Qaeda will be little changed, because their very strengths are manifest in what we are unable to destroy from the air.

Air power will allow us to begin operations for the ultimate destruction of the terrorist network in Afghanistan, but will not achieve this goal by itself. The Soviets learned during ten years of war in Afghanistan that air supremacy does not ensure victory.

The strengths of the military forces we are trying to vanquish are certainly not in the quality of their heavy and sophisticated hardware. Their aircraft, heavy artillery, communications systems, air-defense systems, armor, and heavy vehicles are all decrepit and obsolete. By destroying them, we are cleaning out the Taliban garage of junk — old equipment of limited usefulness anyway against a sophisticated foe. Thus we send them into the mountains where they will rely on their tried and true strengths. If they had little materiel of any great value to begin with, then after we destroy what there is, they have lost little.

These hardcore fighters will melt into their caves with those infantry weapons they can carry on their backs, on light vehicles, and on beasts of burden. They have done this for centuries against numerous invaders. They will hole up in places where modern jet aircraft simply cannot find them or reach them. Even with the very latest hi-tech weapons and equipment, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find and destroy from the air a determined foe well concealed in mountainous terrain, a situation exacerbated by our lack of recent human intelligence from inside Afghanistan.

They will continue to fight using hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, harassing our ground forces with maddening consistency. They will control their own people through terror and extortion, despite what humanitarian aid reaches them. They will move quietly and covertly through vast inhospitable terrain with which they are intimately familiar and comfortable, stopping to resupply from caches of ammunition their rifles, machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers. They will not allow total air supremacy by the coalition, for they will occasionally down our helicopters and low-flying planes with man portable SAMs and small arms.

They are not afraid to die. On the contrary, as we so grimly discovered on September 11, they are happy to make the ultimate sacrifice against the nonbelievers. They are not cowards. Many have lived in these mountains all their lives. It is their home. They will defend it fiercely. They are accustomed to subsisting on very short rations and under Spartan conditions.

Destroying this guerilla force will be different from the campaign against the "kill boxes" of the Gulf War, where the enemy, exposed in the flat, open desert of Iraq and Kuwait, devoid of air defense, were easy targets. It will require determined, high-quality ground forces to ferret them out, mountain-by-mountain, cave-to-cave. The effort may be more reminiscent of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. It will be difficult, messy, sometimes costly fighting that will probably take a long time, and will surely test our capabilities.

If the coalition determines that it must completely destroy this Afghan guerrilla force to achieve its objectives in the war on terrorism, then it must be done with the full recognition of all the ramifications. That is why Secretary Rumsfeld is taking this slowly and carefully, for the test will be not only for our military forces in theater, but for the patience and resolve of the people back home and their leadership.