Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda

Well written book that exposes the obstacles and frustrations of US soldiers trying to fight a war where their own government and military leader's selfishness and micro-managing left them fighting with one are tied behind their backs.

The lack of any consideration of why we just had to be there without a formal war declared. We are undermining our own Constitutional process by using the AUMF and War Powers Act without changing our Constitution. Plus, its illegal and a violation of International law.

Not a Good Day to Die is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what we should really be focusing on to change in our current military if we want to stay relevant in a future that will almost certainly be marked by uncertainty. I am a Reserve Officer who just returned from Iraq and I couldn't believe how many of the lessons I had highlighted in Naylor's book, were still relevant on the ground in Iraq. My son sent me a blog from an unknown author who I would love to thank because he sums up what I believe to be the seminal lesson from Not a Good Day to Die, and the key point we should focus on to improve our military in the future. A brief discussion about the decisionmaking structure of U.S. land forces. The most remarkable examination of this topic is Sean Naylor's recent book on Operation Anaconda, an American effort in 2002 to trap and destroy a force of hundreds of al Qaeda warriors in a valley in Afghanistan. Naylor's book, Not a Good Day to Die, is far too detailed to come close to summarizing here. But two themes reappear throughout Naylor's narrative. First, the American military has grown higher headquarters like weeds in rich soil. Meetings over Operation Anaconda, a single operation planned for three days and thought to be aimed against 200 enemy, involved absurd numbers of competing organizations -- and, therefore, competing operational styles and agendas. Here's a typical laundry list for a single meeting: "Representatives from K-Bar, the CIA, Task Force 11, CFLCC, the Coalition and Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, and Task Force Rakkasan had been invited." And this list is hardly a complete reflection of all the different headquarters involved in Anaconda. As Naylor summarizes: "For a battle that would involve perhaps 2,000 allied troops -- less than a brigade's worth -- in combat, CENTCOM had cobbled together a force that drew elements from eight countries, two U.S. Army divisions, two Special Forces groups, a hodgepodge of aviation units, and a variety of clandestine organizations." Each piece of that stew had its own leadership, with its own agenda and intent. A critical American military effort had become wildly and pointlessly complicated. Four-star generals reviewed plans down to the platoon level. Second, the coordination of those many different elements and agendas meant that painfully negotiated plans became locked into place simply because they were painfully negotiated. After members of a Delta Force team pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of walking up the side of a mountain in the Afghan winter to get a firsthand look at the valley, operation leaders received reports that there were somewhere around 1000 enemy, not the 200 the American plans had called for -- and then they learned further that the enemy was not in the valley, where the plans put them, but were instead on the high ground around it. Leaders of the battle decided to go ahead with the plan as written, reluctant to throw out

IF you liked the Mark Bowden's military thriller "Black Hawk Down," you'll not be disappointed by Army Times reporter Sean Naylor's "Not a Good Day to Die." The books are not only similar in style - both are superb accounts of heart-racing battlefield actions - but are eerily alike in many of the battles they describe. The 1993 street battles in MogadiShu, Somalia, and the March 2002 assault on hundreds of al Qaeda fighters and other jihadist guerrillas in Afghanistan's Shahikot valley had almost too much in common: ad hoc mixes of foreign, conventional and special operations forces, confusing command-and-control regimes, an underestimated and determined foe, poor battlefield intelligence and downed helicopters with wounded soldiers whose predicament threatened to foil the entire mission. Thankfully, the other similarity between these stories is in the extraordinary tales of American battlefield valor, ingenuity, tactical leadership and martial prowess. At the end of the day in this battle U.S. infantrymen, special operators, aviators and Afghan tribesmen got the job done and broke the back of last significant pocket of al Qaeda fighters in Aghanistan. In Operation Anaconda - which took place a few months after the more celebrated battle of Tora Bora - a hodgepodge of U.S. special operations forces, Aghan tribal allies and a few American infantry units tried to flush out hundreds of experienced al Qaeda fighters holed up in a remote valley of Eastern Afghanistan. Throughout the Afghan war, most of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces had fled or dissolved under the combination of precise American airpower, a few special operators and allied tribal armies. The Americans had no reason to believe that this time would be any different. What they found in the Shahikot, much to their dismay, was a much bigger force of determined and superbly trained guerrillas entrenched in innovative formations on key terrain and fighting with tactics and weapons in ways that no intelligence sources predicted. To compound their critical intelligence failures, at first the Americans chose to fight according to their plan, rather than the enemy as they found him - before making the necessary improvisations to accomplish their mission on a radically different battlefield than the one for which they had planned. The American forces eventually gained the upper hand through supreme effort and courage, which Naylor (who was embedded with one of the infantry units) describes with admirable skill and flair. The whole mission almost comes a cropper when the effort to rescue one Navy SEAL left behind on a landing zone leads to the crashes of two giant Chinook helicopters, half a dozen more deaths and numerous serious casualties. This excellent tale could be helped by a little more reflection from Naylor on the lessons of Anaconda, or at least their implications for the war in Afghanistan or the ongoing war or terrorism.

Not a Good Day to Die is clearly the equal to the likes of Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers...Once and Young, and Thunder Run. The book is simply one of the finest accounts of modern combat that has ever been written. With that being said however, it is difficult, in a short narrative, to describe all of the troubling aspects about Operation Anaconda. The book illustrates, only too clearly, the fallacy of the term "unity of command" that the services bandy about and the consequences that result when there was, in fact, no "unity of command" in Afghanistan at least where Anaconda was concerned. Not a Good Day... depicts the failure to understand, despite the marvels of modern technology, that even a subset of ground battle cannot be run from thousands of miles away by an Air Force general officer who doesn't understand what is transpiring on the battlefield, even the nature of ground combat, and who will not listen to the people on the ground who do understand what is taking place. Equally as troubling was the apparent prohibition by Rumsfeld and Franks prohibiting, in an attempt to reduce the size of the American footprint, the Army from employing the fire support needed by the infantry - a constraint not placed on Al Qaida. Troubling also was the ad-hoc nature with which the Army slapped together disparate units while attempting to achieve a certain level of manning and the desire to put an Afghan face on the battle. Also shown is that while there is clearly a role for precision guided munitions such as the JDAM they are not a replacement for integral fire support nor will close air support always be available when needed - as was the case of the AC-130 gunships which were not permitted, according to Air Force directives during Anaconda, to fly support missions in daylight. Troubling also is the apparent belief, by some, that "boat guys" (SEALS) can be given a "shake and bake" course and turned into infantrymen. A couple of SEAL units performed outstandingly-overall however, as a Team, the SEALS were found to be wanting. While the military declares Anaconda a success, it, like the earlier operation at Tora Bora, appears to have allowed most of the Al Qaida fighters in the Shahikot area to slip away to fight another day.

Mr. Naylor is a reporter with Army Times who has covered the military for many years. He displays an insider's understanding as to how military organizations plan and fight. This book is unique in the degree to which the author was able to get the participants to be interviewed; there are a great many details here you won't find anywhere else. He does a great job on the account of Anaconda, a large raid into a mountain stronghold in southeast Afghanistan, conducted in early 2002. The author covers the planning for Anaconda, the infighting among different organizations, and the significant impact the Secretary of Defense's office had as the numbers of conventional forces were limited due to political considerations. Special operators, generals, infantrymen, apache gunship pilots, all have their voices heard. What happens when plans fall apart and soldiers have to pick up the pieces? It's all in here. This is the best account of the Army post 9/11 that has been written, and it is highly unlikely you'll find one better anytime soon. A must read. If you have any interest in the military or national security, pick this up.

This is the most engaging book on war since Grant's Memoirs. Because Naylor exposes the guts and brains of those responsible for the Operation Anaconda disaster, it easily puts to shame virtually all contemporary classics and sets a new standard of military literature. No author has labored more diligently to digest the feelings of those who were actually in the mountain fight or those who boggled its direction from inception to execution. Because Naylor was embedded with the 101st, he had access no other observer can match. It's no surprise that those commanding CENTCOM, SOCOM and JSOC blocked official cooperation until they themselves were replaced. Naylor explains for the first time why Pentagon leadership, with the concurrence of General Franks, refused Army requests to deploy tube artillery and more Apaches into Afghanistan, once conventional forces were inserted into the fight. There is an ugly side to war--a truly violent and repugnant aspect that few have ever captured so persuasively. So long as civilizations wage war, this book is timeless. It captures more than courage and bad luck--it explains who's responsible for things that went right and what went wrong, horribly wrong.