How will a withdrawal from Afghanistan impact the military?
Nathaniel Lowry
Children chased plastic bags floating in the pockmarked road but never approached the dusty compound we had been watching for the past two days. Men in black shawls entered and exited the gate, idling their motorbikes in the courtyard before approaching one of the two mud-roofed huts. One male always traveled flanked by bodyguards; the other men kissed his hands when he approached and hugged him as he departed. Sources indicated the compound we watched through our grainy drone feed was a Taliban operational center used to store improvised explosive devices. A plume of smoke and dust erupted from the compound as two Hellfires rocked the target. As the dust began to clear and bodies emerged in the rubble, it was time to move on. The drone camera slewed to the next target to prepare another strike. I switched screens on my computer and began scouring intelligence reports for the night’s raid. Tempo. Being faster. Doctrinal publications taught in stuffy classrooms harped on these tenets in training, but now I understood their implications in a combat zone. While the flat screen TVs, remote controlled drones, and treadmills on our base in Helmand, Afghanistan, might have been sharp departures from the woods of northern Virginia, competing with a thinking, breathing enemy was my first and only opportunity to experience the ethereal “nature of war†I had heard so much about in training.
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