The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Some in the U.S. military are concluding that the sprawling command structure used in the war in Afghanistan, with troops getting orders from a time zone or even half a world away, has been cumbersome and has created unnecessary friction between military leaders and commanders on the ground.
In an official report on the first eight months of the war, the Marine Corps depicts Central Command, the major U.S. headquarters for the war, based 7,000 miles from Afghanistan in Tampa, Fla., as a distant and troublesome overseer. This command structure has been a unique feature of the Afghanistan campaign, departing from past conflicts, including the Gulf War, in which U.S. military commanders moved their headquarters closer to the battlefield.
The unusual command setup resulted in frequent differences between Central Command and lower headquarters — not only the Marines but also with the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia, which ran the air war.
The differences — coupled with the time differences between Tampa and the war zone — wore down staffs at the operations center and elsewhere in the region. The workday of 14 to 16 hours "was largely due to the need to interface with multiple staffs in different time zones," the Marine report said.
The problem of higher staffs grinding down lower ones from afar is a genuine one that needs to be addressed, said one four-star general. "It’s insatiable, and it really is a downside of instant communication," he said.
One near-unanimous finding of the service reports is that the star of the war has been the U.S. special operations forces and their comrades in similar foreign special-operations units. At one point, there were almost 2,000 special operations troops from various countries inside Afghanistan, said one official, who called the Afghan war "the Olympics of Special Ops."
The Navy, like the other armed services, is studying working more closely with special operations, a senior Navy official said.
The sea service is considering whether to dedicate an aircraft carrier to carrying special operations helicopters, as the USS Kitty Hawk did during the initial weeks of the Afghan war.
One possibility, said a Navy official, is to convert the 42-year-old USS Constellation from a regular aircraft carrier into a special operations carrier, from which both helicopters and Navy jets could fly.
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