Last weekend, a band of 15 Taliban fighters attacked Camp Bastion in Afghanistan’s Helmand province and killed two Marines while inflicting the most damage on U.S. warplanes since the Vietnam war’s Tet offensive 44 years ago.
There are several things worth noting about the brazen strike on the huge U.S.-British post. It carries lessons for the Afghan war, and perhaps all such wars where the U.S. paradoxically finds itself a superpower pinned down by its military might and vulnerable to such audacious tactics/.../
It certainly happened inside the U.S. military, which ignores what transpired at its peril. Military airbases – big, static and generally lightly-defended – have long been tempting targets for the enemy. They will grow even more appetizing as precision-guided munitions, ranging from guided missiles to GPS-guided mortar rounds, find their way down the food chain of war.
“Prospective adversaries are developing and fielding, or have ready access to, military capabilities that will place U.S. forces operating from large, fixed forward bases, and in the littoral regions, at increasing risk,” the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments warned nearly a decade ago. “Consequently, the Pentagon faces new challenges to the operations of air and land forces from overseas bases…even more disconcerting is the growing proliferation of national and commercial satellite services and missile technology. Increased access to these satellite services will allow even regional rogue states both to pre-target key fixed facilities and to monitor U.S. deployments into forward bases.”