Thread by @wesleysmorgan

On Nov 12, A Co of the 101st Airborne's 1-327 Infantry had flown into the Watapur valley to search a town militants had been using to attack their COP. Over 3 days they'd been attacked, given chase, and lost 6 soldiers. They couldn't push any further, so Team Darby was called.

For a sense of the terrain: here's (top left) a photo I took from the mouth of the Watapur in 2013, w/ the Gambir area Team Darby was headed to up near the horizon below the .50-cal's muzzle; and three Army photos from another air assault into the Gambir Jungle in 2011.

Team Darby flew in on MH-47s, hiked down to the target area to which SIGINT suggested the enemy force had retreated, and started searching homes. Two small groups of men took off running, and with ISR guiding him, Pape went after them with his squad and a Belgian malinois (Jari).

Pape and two other NCOs led the way down a steep cliff toward the spot where an infrared beam from a surveillance aircraft overhead was marking two of the enemy runners. At the bottom of the cliff, they started shooting, and Pape started shooting back.

As he walked forward, Pape moved into the field of fire of a Taliban machine gunner who was waiting in the hidden mouth of a cave or tunnel system, who fired a burst that wounded him.

Here is an Army narrative of what happened next: valor.militarytimes.com/hero/54252

The Ranger platoon leader's guess was that Pape had stumbled on the entrance to a command post, maybe the one a Taliban or al-Qaida commander had been using to oversee the fight against 1-327. Fighters from all around rallied to protect it as Team Darby tried to save Pape.

It was rare for AC-130s to stay out past dawn, but 2 did on Nov 16, 2010, as Kiowas also did gun-runs. As part of the platoon secured a terrace for an HLZ, another part threw cave-clearing grenades into the tunnel, then had the AC-130s focus on it.

The platoon leader's account:

The company medic, Luis Aponte, did everything he could to save Pape, but air medevac operations in that kind of terrain are very tough, as a TF East SEAL explained here a couple of weeks before Team Darby's Gambir mission. Kevin Pape died before the helicopter arrived.

Team Darby wound up being awarded a Valorous Unit Award for the Nov 15-16 Gambir mission, during which it had killed dozens of militants in a place largely beyond the reach of conventional troops, one where al-Qaida Arabs were known to hide out and train local fighters.

As with anything in the Afghan war, it's hard to say just what the mission accomplished in the big picture. The Rangers killed militants who had killed Americans, probably, which the 1-327 troops were grateful for. But the enemy in Kunar always replenished their ranks after...

...big air-assault missions into the mountains, which there was a long tradition of in Kunar by 2010.

One thing that set Bulldog Bite & the Gambir mission apart from those other air assaults, though, was that its purpose was to ease withdrawal of US troops from the Pech valley.

The most a US unit could reasonably hope for from a big air assault in Kunar was for the casualties they'd inflicted to slow down Taliban operations for a few weeks or maybe a few months at best. That could make these missions seem pointless, since what they were buying...

...time and "white space" for tended to be just more of the same counterinsurgency operations down on the valley floor below that proved fruitless over time and wound up leading to more air assaults: the "mowing the lawn" phenomenon.

Bulldog Bite was a little different, though.

What the Nov 2010 Watapur mission bought time for was a partial pullout—one that 101st Airborne leadership fought hard for at a time when ISAF was loathe to cede ground, especially in places like the Pech that previously had been held up as COIN successes. nytimes.com/2011/02/25/wor…

But this is the Afghan war we're talking about, so it wasn't long before new units rotated in, partly reversed the withdrawal, & went back up there. On June 25, 2011, two 25th ID soldiers & an interpreter died descending the same mountain. csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2…

As US ground troops pulled out of the Pech again in 2012-13, the JSOC task force switched to air strikes in the area in a drone campaign called Operation Haymaker. For JSOC leaders, that was in part because the risks of missions like the Gambir Jungle one were so high.

It took 5 years of Haymaker strikes for the JSOC task force to kill their big fish, AQ leader Farouq al-Qahtani, who was known to spend time in the Watapur, Waygal & Helgal valleys & was likely up there somewhere at the time of the 2010 Team Darby mission. washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoin…

By then, al-Qaida's foothold in the mountains north of the Pech was under threat not just from US drones but from ISIS's Afghan branch. Gambir is where JSOC killed a senior ISIS-K figure during a spate of Kunar strikes in the summer of 2017. voanews.com/extremism-watc…

Today, the war in the side-valleys north (Watapur etc) and south (Korengal etc) of the Pech continues—between ISIS-K and the Taliban. As of early this year, the Ranger-led JSOC task force was still doing strikes there against both groups.

https://twitter.com/wesleysmorgan/status/1319333708164288513?s=20

“Yeah, it raised eyebrows,” a JSOC task force member told me of Rangers' uneasiness with using strikes to help their old foes against new ones. "But I think everyone understands that it’s time to try something different.” The memory of fallen Ranger legends like Pape looms large.

As the US force in Afghanistan shrinks down to 2,500 and maybe further, the Ranger-led JSOC task force will remain the central part of it. Among its members will likely be some 19y/o Rangers who weren't born when the first soldiers of their regiment arrived at Bagram in Dec 2001.