Victory Point - Ed Darack [28]
⅔’s first combat deployment since Vietnam would be far more complex and gut-wrenchingly difficult than any in the battalion could imagine. But the dividends yielded from their work would be far greater than any of them could have dreamed.
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SYNERGY OF SUCCESS
As ⅔ battled notional enemies on training grounds in Hawaii, Nevada, and California, 3/3 fought a multifaceted counterinsurgency campaign deep in the Hindu Kush that yielded strengthened regional stability and a beaten-down enemy, forging a broad operational pathway for ⅔’s upcoming deployment. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Norman Cooling—who would subsequently lead his battalion in yet another successful COIN fight in Iraq’s Al Anbar province just nine months after returning from Afghanistan—3/3 stormed after Islamic extremists throughout the hinterlands of eastern Afghanistan and built networks of long-term security and trust between the isolated region’s people and the nascent Afghan government, one of the cardinal objectives of Operation Enduring Freedom.
3/3’s victories didn’t come easy, though. The battalion had been assigned an area of operation roughly the size of South Carolina that consisted of six contiguous provinces: Laghman, Nangarhar, Khowst, Paktia, Logar, and Kunar. And they’d arrived just in time to face the brunt of one of the harshest winters in those provinces’ recent history, with temperatures crashing below minus-twenty degrees Fahrenheit at high-altitude locations like Gardez and crushing snowfall that icy gales caused to drift to more than ten feet in depth in some places. Yet the battalion, fully prepared for the conditions as a result of their focused and rigorous predeployment training at Twentynine Palms and the Mountain Warfare Training Center, kept a hard-charging operational pace, always maintaining at least one platoon of Marines outside the wire at each of 3/3’s forward operating bases at all times, as well as kicking off one battalion-scale operation per month. And while the Marines of 3/3 consistently attained their mission goals throughout their deployment, they achieved them not by working within their MAGTF structure, but as a component of a larger “joint task force,” an environment built of multiple command layers where other U.S. military units could operate simultaneously in 3/3’s area—some of them with entirely different command rules than those to which 3/3 adhered.
While the concept of unifying all components of a military campaign under one distinct commander has been one the USMC has embraced and forged doctrine around since the birth of the Marine Corps, a codified framework for all U.S. services working with one another—jointly—emerged only recently with the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Prior to the Goldwater-Nichols Act, military command flowed from the upper echelon of each service branch—the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps—down to the individual unit level of a respective branch for operations. But interservice rivalries, often ego-driven and funding-oriented, sometimes led to virtual paralysis at the operational level, ultimately yielding tactical inefficacy and sometimes injury and even death. The act, which keeps the responsibility for training and equipping personnel of each branch in the hands of the service chiefs, established geographically defined “unified combatant commands” (Central Command, European Command, Southern Command, etc.), each composed of personnel from all of the armed services.