Echoes from a Distant Battlefield

Echoes from a Distant Battlefield
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Echoes from a Distant Battlefield
On July 13, 2008, NATO troops stationed in the village of Wanat were attacked by more than two hundred Taliban Guerillas in the Wanat district, Nuristan province of Afghanistan. The Taliban forces surrounded the remote base of the American troops, broke through the United States army defense lines and forced through to the main base. In this battle, nine American soldiers were killed with twenty-seven becoming seriously wounded in the battle. American soldiers lost their lives and several of them were seriously wounded. As such, the initial assessment illustrated by the Cubbison report that implicated the elite brigade chain of command is entirely accurate. This paper will critically analyze how these implications are justifiable based on the occurrences leading to the Wanat attack on the American troops.
First and foremost, the American army decided to proceed with the administration of punishments to the two commanders responsible for the safety of the American troops in the Wanat War. As such, this signals a weakness that had been experienced in the American troop’s chain of command that was responsible for the Wanat attack. Additionally, the Cubbison report indicated that surveillance, critical intelligence, and reconnaissance assets were channeled to other combat operations in different areas in Afghanistan which left the soldiers in the Wanat camp vulnerable to enemy attacks.

In this case, according to the report, several top-ranking army officers failed terribly in the battlefield which eventually led to the death and several casualties in the Wanat attack of 2008. From delayed artillery response and poor defense coordination of the troops, the military chain command can be blamed for the undesirable attack of the American troops in Wanat. In other reports, it is indicated that the camo was supposed to be evacuated one year before the attack but this wasn’t done because the army commanders had extended other operation in this region (Tan, 2010).
References
Tan, M. (2010). McChrystal issues nonjudicial punishment in COP (Combat Outpost) Keating attack: Report’s findings mirror investigation into 2008 Wanat battle. Army Times, 70(31), 24.