Word: civilians
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...number of Taliban we kill," McChrystal wrote, "but instead on our ability to separate insurgents from the people." To that end, the directive explicitly enjoined force leaders "to scrutinize and limit the use of force like close air support against residential compounds and other locations likely to produce civilian casualties." In truth, the new policy was already being applied: on July 2, nearly 4,000 Marines and 650 Afghan troops stormed into Helmand province in southern Afghanistan aboard helicopters and armored vehicles. But within hours, the Marines issued a statement declaring they had "not used artillery, and no bombs have...
...pressured, only to pop up and attack elsewhere. In Helmand, U.S. troops will set up small outposts instead of pulling back when the operation is done. They'll live near the locals and offer protection in advance of Afghanistan's Aug. 20 presidential election. Then McChrystal's forces and civilian advisers will begin trying to build economic and governmental institutions...
...Last week you delivered a firm directive to your commanders in a morning brief. There had been an incident in which civilians were killed when soldiers ordered a strike on a compound from which they were receiving fire. In the brief you ordered your commanders to "stop dropping compounds." Can you tell me more about this? What we have done is written a tactical directive. And it provides my intent on how we are going to execute operations in general [to be released soon]. But specifically, the use of deadly force. The reason I spent a lot of time personally...
...focus our force on fighting the war that we want to fight, the right kind of counterinsurgency strategy; and second, if we can organize ourselves, in terms of command and control structures, in terms of unity of effort, in terms of all working together. The increase in civilian capacity that is coming in - how we lash that together - I am hoping that we can do that in a matter of months, not years. Then when I sense that we have the team moving in an even better direction than it has ever before, then I think we will start...
...When President John F. Kennedy put McNamara in the Pentagon, he gave him two orders: strengthen civilian control of the military and make the nation's armed forces work better. McNamara, educated at the University of California, Berkeley and the Harvard Graduate School of Business, tilted power away from the uniformed Joint Chiefs, who had held sway during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, and toward his own team of brainy young civilian experts. McNamara's "whiz kids" engaged in the kind of "qualitative analysis" he had used to turn Ford around and which he believed would lead to a better...