Victory Point - Ed Darack [36]
3/3 had achieved success not just through operational ingenuity, but through consistency—keeping the pressure on the bad guys even through the dead of winter. Because it was now primarily a COIN fight, MacMannis felt it was far better to continue to coerce the enemy out of the hills and onto the government of Afghanistan’s side than to take them on kinetically. But with the spring thaw coming, the enemy was undoubtedly going to force the Marines to put rounds downrange, and with the operational model set forth by 3/3, the Island Warriors would have a full spectrum of opportunities open to them to win the fight.
4
INTO THE HINDU KUSH
Marking the final stretch of their Afghan tour with yet two more successful battalion-level operations in the wake of Spurs, 3/3 maintained its vigorous tempo straight through to the bitter end of their OEF deployment. But while the battalion’s pace and outlook remained rock solid, the command structure under which the Marines of 3/3 stood in Afghanistan changed just weeks before ⅔ rolled in to replace them—and changed in a way that would dramatically affect the operational construct that Cooling and Priddy had developed and that ⅔ looked to adopt. New commanders replaced not one or two, but all three levels of command above 3/3 in Afghanistan, with Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry taking the reins of CFC-A from David Barno, Major General Jason Kamiya taking over CJTF-76 from Olson, and just two weeks before 3/3 officially handed over authority to ⅔, Colonel Patrick Donahue of the 82nd Airborne (known in-country as Task Force Devil) assuming command of RC-East from Gary Cheek. And while Donahue and his staff would ensure a smooth transition for ⅔, working to provide all types of support from intel, to aviation, to artillery for the Marines for both their COIN campaign as well as kinetic ops, Major General Kamiya, after assuming command of CJTF-76 in mid-March, seemed to favor an operational balance weighed less heavily on the counterinsurgency fight and more on aggressive counterterror missions. Further influencing the way 3/3 (and soon thereafter ⅔) would be able to plan and undertake operations, a new CJSOTF-A commander took over—one who sought strict adherence to USSOCOM doctrine—doctrine stating that SOF teams could operate with complete independence of conventional forces—and never “for” them (or their operations)—although SOF could be supported by conventional units. And while Olson had praised the operational model in which 3/3 and SOF worked together—and the SOF units themselves found the arrangement to work excellently for them—Kamiya seemed to agree with the new CJSOTF-A commander. Furthermore, and of equal significance, Kamiya sought a greater focus on the Tora Bora region (roughly seventy miles to the southwest of the Pech and Korangal Valley areas), where he felt that forces under his control should pursue direct-action counterterror campaigns, necessitating that 3/3 Marines reduce their presence in the Korangal in order to push into the Tora Boras—at the likely cost of allowing extremist forces to more aggressively move into and around the important corner of the Hindu Kush, virtually assuring a retrogression of the stability 3/3 had worked so hard to achieve in that area.
In mid-March, 3/3 kicked off Operation Mavericks, which the battalion planned and executed as an analogue of Spurs. Utilizing Navy SEALs, the Marines focused on villages in northern Laghman province, destroying an extensive al-Qaeda cave network, capturing eighteen suspected insurgents and terrorists, and undertaking extensive humanitarian relief efforts to help locals during a spate of devastating floods. Mavericks once again proved that operations planned with careful, detailed SOF-conventional-forces integration could yield outcomes