In his debrief, Captain Swenson railed justifiably about the failure of staff duty officers hidden away in a distant command-and-control center to approve the delivery of artillery and airpower in support of his desperate action. Imagine for a moment that Swenson had a simple GoPro-like camera on his helmet capable of displaying the ground situation and linked to screens in the control center. Had officers in the center seen the action in real time though Swenson’s eyes, these graphic images might have convinced them immediately to approve supporting fires from a mortar unit located only a few kilometers away. You can buy the GoPro-like camera at Walmart.
According to unclassified reports of the battle, an aerial drone had shown up over Swenson’s unit five hours after the Taliban sprang the ambush. What if our military had been able to deploy enough drones to put a set of aerial eyes over every ground patrol marching into a dangerous and uncertain situation? Surely had a drone been overhead the Taliban would never have dared to open fire. You can buy small drones with a camera attached during your shopping trip to Walmart.
What if one of the lead Soldiers in Swenson’s patrol had carried a sensor that detected movement or the metabolic presence of humans nearby? Such devices are easy to develop; the technology has been in use by civilian security companies for years. Again, had Swenson’s team been warned, there would have been no ambush and no medal. You can buy a home security system that detects human movement at Walmart. Add another item to your cart. . . .
The Taliban engaged Swenson’s team from behind the protection of large boulders and stone walls. Swenson was able to keep his attackers at bay only by throwing a hand grenade at them, just as his grandfather did in World War II. Had Swenson had a means actually to engage enemies behind the wall, maybe he would not have enjoyed his visit to the White House. The Germans developed such a weapon system—the M-25 “Smart” grenade launcher—before 9/11. The U.S. Army did not buy the system until 2014 and has yet to get it to troops in combat.
After fourteen years of war the ground services, the Army and Marine Corps, remain starved of new, cutting-edge, lifesaving matériel, while the Department of Defense and its big defense company allies continue to spend generously on profitable big-ticket programs like planes, ships, missiles, and computers. Soldiers’ “stuff” today is more Popular Mechanics than Star Wars. However, Captain Swenson and his six colleagues might have had a better day in Afghanistan had the nation spent a bit more to give them an overwhelming, in fact dominant, technological edge over the enemy.
After suffering almost nine thousand dead Soldiers and Marines, the nation still cannot offer an advantage to those who do most of the dying. Our Soldiers and Marines should have gone into Iraq and Afghanistan ready for an unfair fight—that is, unfair in their own favor—at the squad level. Giunta’s life was saved by state-of-the-art body armor. More Soldiers and Marines might have been saved had this body armor been provided before they started on the march to Baghdad in 2003. Too many Soldiers and Marines died from primitive roadside bombs, “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs, during the early days in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon weapons-buying bureaucracy was too slow in supplying the troops with explosive-resistant vehicles to protect against IEDs. We must also ask why the Taliban were able to see Giunta’s squad first, simply by observing his Soldiers from the surrounding high ground. After fourteen years of war, no small unit in such peril should ever have to move exposed to unimpeded observation.
Army and Marine Corps infantry squads were outgunned in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese army’s superior AK-47 assault rifles. One would think that maybe, fifty years later, infantry Soldiers would be able to fire a bullet costing about thirty cents that did not disintegrate in the air. A two-hundred-dollar aiming device developed for hunters would provide the precision needed to hit a distant enemy target with the same relative precision as that of the rifles used by the Taliban. The Army has yet to buy it.
For more than two-thirds of a century, this country has preferred to crush its enemies by exploiting its superiority in the air and on the seas. Unfortunately, these efforts to win with firepower over manpower have failed to consider the fact that the enemy has a vote. From Mao Zedong to Ho Chi Minh to Osama bin Laden, all our enemies have recognized that our vulnerable strategic center of gravity is dead Americans. It is no surprise that the tactic common to them all has been to kill Americans, not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. Every enemy has ceded us those domains where we are dominant—the air and the sea. They challenge us instead where we are weak: small units, on ground unfamiliar to us but familiar to them.
Memories fade fast. Already the process of denial has begun again, even as smoke still obscures battlefields in the Middle East and South Asia. Politicians on both ends of the political spectrum have called for cutting the ground-force budget as a means of paying down the national debt. The experiences of Captain Swenson and Staff Sergeant Giunta and their gallant men should remind lawmakers of their unpaid debt to those who do the dirty business of intimate killing. We hope policy makers watched both White House Medal of Honor ceremonies and paused to reflect on their stories. Our leaders should be asking why the richest nation on Earth could not have done more to help these small infantry units prevail on the tactical battlefield. For the sake of both these great men, please: no more fair fights.
Who are these (mostly) men? A popular rallying cry for those who want to redistribute the nation’s wealth is, “The wealthy 1 percent versus the rest of us!” In American wars there is the other 99 percent, those who do not have to go to war thanks to the 1 percent who serve. A cynic might say that all the good citizens who shake hands with servicemen and say “Thanks for your service” are really saying, “Thanks for doing this so my son can go to graduate school.”
Yet the Swensons and Giuntas—the ones who do the real fighting and dying—constitute an even smaller slice of American society than the honored “1 percent.” In fact, the United States’ “intimate killers” account for only about 0.02 percent of the population. For the most part, America is clueless about the uniqueness of guys like these. I witness this sad perceptual divide every time I pass through the Baltimore-Washington Airport on my way overseas. Take a moment sometime and walk over to the BWI Military Airlift Command Gate as young servicemen and women drag themselves through the dark corners of the customs gate to debouch into sunlight and the arms of loved ones and the hugs of grateful citizens. It is an interesting study. A natural line forms. Single file, these desert sand–clad youngsters shake hands as if they were walking off the court after an NCAA basketball game. The greeting crowd is always drawn to the American beauties. The first to be deluged is always a tall, blond airman (actually an “airwoman”) with tightly braided hair, smelling fresh even after twenty hours stuffed into a crowded aluminum tube. I look at her rank and badges and know from them that this is her first tour and that she has spent the past four months in an air-conditioned “hooch” with shiny toilets, running water, and an Anthony’s Pizza or a Starbucks just around the corner.
Walking some distance behind, bending under a heavy rucksack, is a kid who looks much older. He is not smiling. Most likely, he is trying to get around the pack and into a taxi that can take him to the nearest bar. His boots give him away. They are worn and discolored. He has pushed his trousers cuffs down over his boot tops to make his short stride more comfortable. If he is white, he is darkly tanned. Most of them sport unhealed blisters and deep scratches. Some show signs of having been recently wounded. And they all wear the same black badge. It is a long, thin rectangle about four inches long surrounded by a wreath. If you look closely you will see the faint outline of a Revolutionary War–era musket embedded in the rectangle. It is the Combat Infantry Badge (CIB), the most coveted and respected piece of apparel in the military services—because (to those few who know) it is worn by a tiny percentage of the 1 percent who do virtually all of the killing and dying in America’s wars today.
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