[roger_ramjet]

Robert Kaplan from yesterday's WSJ on our Afghan mission and what military transformation really looks like. We need more of it not less, says he.

Think Global, Fight Local
Military bureaucracy is hindering the war in Afghanistan.

BY ROBERT D. KAPLAN

Two years ago this month, fewer than 100 men of the Army's Fifth Special Forces Group, based out of Fort Campbell, Ky. - almost all of them noncommissioned officers - essentially took down the Taliban regime on their own. Along with a handful of Air Force special-ops embeds, they succeeded where the British and the Soviets before them in Afghanistan had failed, because they had been given no specific instructions. The bureaucratic layers between the U.S. forces and the secretary of defense were severed. They were told merely to link up with the "indigs" (indigenous Northern Alliance and friendly Pushtun elements) and make it happen.

The result was that they grew beards and rode horses from one redoubt to the next, even as their team sergeants called in air strikes without first seeking written approval. Because Fifth Group was allowed to operate independently of the vertical, Industrial Age hierarchy of the Pentagon, and because it combined 19th-century warfare with 21st-century close air support, the Fifth Group achieved the very postindustrial military "transformation" that elites in Washington are incessantly talking about, but don't seem to understand - because real transformation, which involves the dilution of central control, would make many of these elites themselves redundant...