Pentagon announces Afghanistan deployment

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Last modified Monday, September 15, 2008 10:15 AM PDT
MILITARY: Pentagon announces Afghanistan deployment

By MARK WALKER - Staff Writer

The Marine Corps will send about 2,000 troops to Afghanistan in November, the Pentagon announced Monday morning.

Approximately 1,000 of those troops will come from the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment based at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina with the remaining force being drawn from units around the world.

It was not immediately clear if any local Marines from Camp Pendleton or Miramar Marine Corps Air Station are included in the deployment.

Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Carl Redding at the Pentagon said a headquarters group that will head up the ground and air task force should be identified by this afternoon.

Logistics and aviation elements that will be part of the force will be identified in the next couple of days, he said.

"We are sorting it out now and we have to have all the units notified because the deployment is rapidly approaching," he said.

The Marines will effectively replace units from the Marine Air Ground Combat Center and Camp Lejeune that have been in Afghanistan since April and are slated to come home at the end of November.

The Pentagon also announced that 3,700 soldiers from the Army's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., are headed to Afghanistan in January.

Contact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

3/8 will deploy to Afghanistan
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September 15, 2008 - 2:22PM
JENNIFER HLAD
DAILY NEWS STAFF



Third Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, will deploy to Afghanistan instead of Iraq, as originally planned.

The Camp Lejeune-based infantry battalion will serve as the ground combat element of a Marine Air-Ground Task Force created to replace the Lejeune- based 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit and the California-based 2nd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, according to the Department of Defense and a Marine spokesman.

The MAGTF, which will leave in November, will also include a logistics element, a headquarters element and an aviation element, but those unit assignments have not been released. The units will come from around the Marine Corps, said spokesman Maj. David Nevers.

The Marine units in Afghanistan now have been praised for their work in the southern part of the country, and both units' tours were extended by 30 days at the request of the International Security Assistance Force. Commandant Gen. James Conway has said he would like to replace the units but would need to pull troops out of Iraq to do so.

"We just have to, I think, figure out a way to maintain the gains that we've achieved," Conway said in an Aug. 27 Department of Defense press briefing, according to the briefing transcript. "Everyone seems to agree that additional forces are the ideal course of action for preventing a Taliban comeback, but just where they're going to come from is still up for discussion."

Nevers said the deployment of the specially created MAGTF is an attempt to build on the successes of the 24th MEU and 2/7.

"The idea was to avoid losing the ground that the Marines have made up while they've been over there ... to keep that momentum going," Nevers said. "There's been a great deal of discussion at a very senior level about the need to reinforce troop levels in Afghanistan, and this is a step in that direction."

3/8 is going through Mojave Viper training at the Marine Air-Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif. But the training took into account the possibility of a change in mission, said 1st Lt. Philip Klay, spokesman for the 2nd Marine Division.

That meant "not only developing the skills necessary for operations in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but also having additional training specific to Operation Enduring Freedom (in Afghanistan)," Klay said.

Afghanistan-specific elements included "cultural training, preparation for operations in Afghan-like terrain and interaction with Afghan role-players," he said.

The Army's 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, from Ft. Drum, N.Y., will deploy about 3,700 soldiers to Afghanistan in January "to increase the capabilities of the International Security Assistance Force," according to a Department of Defense news release.

Contact interactive content editor and military reporter Jennifer Hlad at 910-219-8467. Visit http://fromafghanistan.encblogs.com for more information about the 24th MEU.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Defense Department names units bound for Afghanistan
By Jeffrey Schogol, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Tuesday, September 16, 2008



ARLINGTON, Va. — The Defense Department has identified the additional forces headed to Afghanistan beginning this fall.

A Marine Air-Ground Task Force with about 2,000 Marines will deploy to Afghanistan in November, followed in January by 3,700 soldiers from the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., the DOD announced Monday.

The Marine task force will include the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, as well as air, logistics and headquarters elements, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters Monday.

The task force will replace the 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, which has grown from about 1,000 to 1,500 Marines during its deployment, a Defense official said.

The decision to replace the battalion with a larger task force reflects the experience of the experience of 2/7, which realized it needed more capabilities, such as route clearance, the official said.

President Bush announced last week that about 8,000 troops would be withdrawn from Iraq by early next year, while more troops will be headed to Afghanistan.

But the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will drop from November until January because the 2,400 Marines with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit are not being replaced after they leave, the official said.

Recently, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conceded that the U.S. military is not winning in Afghanistan.

The extra troops going to Afghanistan will not meet the request for three extra brigade combat teams there, but Mullen called the move "a good and important start" in front of Congress last week. "Frankly, I judge the risk of not sending them too great a risk to ignore."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

4-star: Far more troops needed in Afghanistan
By Robert Burns - The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Sep 16, 2008 14:28:59 EDT

KABUL, Afghanistan — Even after an extra Army brigade joins the fight against the insurgency here in January, three times that many reinforcements will be needed shortly thereafter, the highest-ranking U.S. general here said Tuesday.

Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO-led international forces in Afghanistan, told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Robert Gates that the brigade arriving in January is an urgent requirement based on an assessment that fighting in eastern Afghanistan is tougher than believed six months ago.

“There are an additional three brigade combat teams” that have been validated by the Pentagon as a requirement, McKiernan said. He would not say exactly how many extra soldiers that entails, but said that it was more than 10,000 — beyond the roughly 3,700 in reinforcements that are scheduled to arrive in January.

There currently are about 33,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and about 146,000 in Iraq.

Gates arrived in the Afghan capital Tuesday evening after presiding at a ceremony in Baghdad where Gen. Ray Odierno took over for Gen. David Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Gates was meeting over dinner in Kabul with McKiernan and was to hold talks with senior Afghan officials on Wednesday.

More U.S. forces have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year than in all of 2007 as a resurgent Taliban-led insurgency has adopted bolder and often deadlier tactics. U.S. officials say the insurgency cannot win a conventional war, but its persistence has left U.S. and NATO leaders seeking reinforcements and has eroded the credibility of Afghanistan’s fragile elected government.

McKiernan said he had no doubt that the insurgency could not win in Afghanistan, but he did not say U.S. forces are assured of victory, either.

“We are not losing, but we are winning slower in some places than others,” he said.

In the interview, McKiernan also disclosed that he recently issued a revised order meant to govern the tactics and procedures followed by U.S. forces when engaging in air and ground fights against the insurgents. The revision, issued Sept. 2, was in response to a series of attacks that resulted in civilian deaths — most notably the highly publicized allegations that a U.S. attack on an Afghan village compound on Aug. 22 killed as many as 90 Afghan civilians, including women and children. The U.S. military has disputed the allegation but also has launched a new investigation in light of emerging evidence.

McKiernan said 90 percent of his new directive is meant to re-emphasize existing procedures.

“We’ve put an increased focus on partnering with Afghan security forces,” he said in explaining the main change. “In other words, we want to run more and more operations that are combined operations with the Afghan army and/or the Afghan police. That’s probably a new emphasis on this tactical directive.”

Petraeus’ next assignment will be commander of U.S. Central Command, with broader responsibilities. From his headquarters in Tampa, Fla., he will oversee U.S. military involvement throughout the Middle East, including Iraq, as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Central Asian nations. He takes up that post in late October.

On Tuesday, meanwhile, Odierno became the top American commander of the conflict in Iraq. At a traditional change-of-command ceremony attended by top Iraqi and American military and civilian officials, Petraeus said that Odierno’s skills and experience make him “the perfect man for the job.”

With Gates presiding at the ceremony in a cavernous rotunda of a former Saddam Hussein palace outside Baghdad, Petraeus handed over the flag of his command, known as Multinational Force Iraq, to Odierno and then bade farewell.

Petraeus said the insurgents and militia extremists who have created such chaos in Iraq over the past five years are now weakened but not yet fully defeated. He noted that before he took the assignment in February 2007 he had described the situation as “hard but not hopeless.”

He thanked his troops for having “turned ‘hard but not hopeless’ into still hard but hopeful.”

Despite the security gains, insurgents retain the ability to carry out devastating attacks. On Monday evening, a female suicide bomber blew herself up among a group of police officers northeast of Baghdad, killing at least 22 people. Hours earlier, car bombs in the capital killed 13 people.

Because of Odierno’s extensive previous experience in Iraq, he is generally expected to be able to continue building on the gains made under Petraeus’ command, although an evolving set of difficult challenges face him here and in Washington, where he will soon have a new commander in chief.

A major part of Odierno’s job will involve working with Iraqi political leaders, in tandem with U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. In that role Odierno may call on his experiences in 2004-05 as assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, when he was the Pentagon’s liaison to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and frequently traveled abroad with her.

Ellie