Victory Point - Ed Darack [24]
The utilitarian elegance and explosive potency of a MAGTF derives from the smooth integration of all its components as well as its straightforward leadership structure—one commander runs the entire show. Military theorists speak of a variety of tenets vital to waging a successful military campaign, and the two most important about which they speak, write, and ponder are intimately related to each other: unity of effort and unity of command. When the commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (a full colonel), says “go,” everyone “rogers up” and does just that: they go—the grunts, the heavy lift helicopters, the TACAIR and rotary-wing close-air-support components—everyone; the Marines of an MEU (or any other MAFTF) work together as a well-oiled and devastatingly effective machine, all unified in mission orientation and goals, and each resolute in his specific task, bonded throughout by their infantry-centric, ethos-driven mind-set. Dissent, unsolicited or irrelevant input, and compromise simply don’t exist in the Marine Corps command structure, and while a commander works closely with and seeks the ideas of his senior leadership during the planning phases of an operation, upon execution, the Marines of the task force act in symphonic harmony under the sole directorship of the boss.
As the Marines of ⅔ pushed through the weeks of training at Twentynine Palms and their Afghan deployment loomed ever closer on the horizon, the battalion emerged as a motivated, fully capable unit. The ever-thoughtful Lieutenant Colonel MacMannis worked closely with the battalion’s executive officer, the hawklike Major Rob Scott, to ensure a smooth transition from training to the Afghan fight, mulling over a broad spectrum of details from travel to ammo, to how to disperse the battalion once in-country. Working closely with Scott and MacMannis, Major Tom Wood, the battalion’s brusque and tirelessly ultracommitted operations officer, further refined his already crack tactical skills through planning, replanning, and then observing—eagle-eyed—the performance of the Marines on the ground in the training area.
And as ⅔ trained, 3/3 carried on the Afghan fight—feeding information (invaluable for ⅔’s preparation for the fight) back to the Island Warriors in the form of classified after-action reports, which ⅔’s intelligence officer, the brilliant Captain Scott Westerfield, inhaled, poring over every minute detail of the documents. Having developed a solid overall picture of the area of operation to which ⅔ would soon deploy, Westerfield quickly began to take interest in a number of the area’s Islamic extremist terrorist and insurgent cells and their respective leaders; and while not particularly conspicuous on the surface of the pool of information, ripples of one insurgent leader kept nudging his attention more than any other . . .
The training at Twentynine Palms would reach a feverish pitch throughout the four-week training cycle at the Combat Center. Every one of the 820 Marines of the battalion—from administrators, to supply officers, to the all-important logisticians, the vital Navy Corpsmen (medical specialists attached to Marine units), and of course the grunts themselves—worked day and night amid the tan, chiseled mountains and sweeping plains of the Mojave Desert training base. They undertook a diverse series of regimens that included culture, convoy operations, intelligence gathering, and advanced weapons training. While much of the work to be done on the ground in Afghanistan would be COIN in nature, ⅔’s leadership knew that the fight would undoubtedly go heavily kinetic, especially after the spring thaw that would allow the enemy easier movement throughout the peaks and passes of the Hindu Kush. And the way to best prepare the grunts for a dynamic, harsh fight, was not just to provide specialized training, but to immerse them in the heart and soul of modern USMC ground combat—to give them live-fire, combined-arms MAGTF immersion.
Located deep within the confines of the Combat Center, a broad sweep of rolling desert known