If Gates or anyone else in the DOD was to speak directly about every hard place that US troops are currently at work in Distributed Operation type environments, they’d have to spend several dozen hours listing places and events. And the list would be obsolete before the presentation could even begin.
Just because they’re not on the evening news does not mean they’ve been forgotten, except by those who’s entire reality is formed by the evening news.
These docs are USMC centric but the DO operational model is getting widely used by all combat branches.
http://www.mcwl.usmc.mil/SV/DO%20FAQs%2016%20Mar%2005.pdf
http://www.mcwl.usmc.mil/SV/SV_DO.cfm
Small unit detachments operating in dispersed nodes is how things are being done and how it’s going to be done in much of the fighting we’re going to see in the foreseeable future.
Something that definitely needs to be taken care of, though, is this continued mistaken concept that personnel of a non-uniformed force are “civilians” and any part of “innocent” when they conduct support operations, either as intel gatherers, communicators or logistics operators, be they young, old or female. If they’re assisting the enemy, their proper designation is as targets.
For so long as we let ourselves get played by such, we’ll continue to get punked by such.
Everyone in America - civilian, politician or military, should be required to read your words 100 times - maybe some of them would get it.
The 'rules of engagement" should be exactly what you write
You're taking a page out of Caesar's Commentaries .... he took the same tough line with the Germans who'd passed the Rhine and gotten into Gaulish territory with their baggage trains (it was actually the beginning of the Germanic invasion/migration -- replayed 250 years later, and then 150 years again after that in 405 A.D. when they crossed the Rhine for good).
Caesar deployed against the Usipetes' and Tencteri's battle line which they presented when confronted, but he also sent a strong detachment around in a flanking move and attacked the German camp and its weak baggage guard. The Germans heard the uproar in their rear and broke their lines to rush back to protect their families, and that's when he fell on them and defeated them in detail, driving them into the river with great loss of life......and then the German tribes on the far bank whose territory they'd crossed previously finished the job. Those tribes weren't wiped out, btw -- they survived, and together with two other tribes amalgamated into a new supertribe that called itself the Franks. And thereby, as the storyteller said, hangs a tale.
The fight in Afghanistan is hard rock, and our guys up there definitely need some help. Bush and Gates's successors need to stop playing around and start recruiting for real, and bump up the Army and Marine Corps.