The Ink Of War: Afghanistan Air Base’s Best Tattoos

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I Was Saying Boo-Urns!

Tattooing, an aggressive and intimidating mixture of endurance and art, is as old as warfare itself. But each generation, and each war, yields its own warrior body art. In Afghanistan, America's longest war, troop tats have matured alongside the culture's growing acceptance of ink.

To any repeat visitor to U.S. military bases in Afghanistan or Iraq over the past ten years, it seems like soldiers get more ink as time passes. Bureaucratically, the military still has an ambivalent attitude to tattoos, a vestige of justified fears of gang affiliation; most services still aren't cool with neck tats. But the official restrictions have been repeatedly relaxed over the past decade at war. Practically speaking, the military's got little choice. Recruits are often inked up when they join, and servicemembers' admiration for tattoos is as characteristic of today's troops as working out when bored.

So consider the tattoos here a sociological document of the Afghanistan war circa 2010. At Bagram Air Field, the war's largest U.S. base, troop tattoos are ironic and earnest; professional and amateur; and every one filled with pride. (And if you want to represent your base or your unit by showing off your ink in a future gallery, email us!) Time will tell if the U.S.'s impact on Afghanistan is as indelible -- or as pleasing to the eye.

U.S. Air Force Tech Sergeant Geoff Gerencer

Believe it or not, Gerencer insists that he's not even such a big Simpsons fan. "I wanted to change up the Japanese style a bit," he says.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman/Wired.com

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Petraeus Quietly Disses ‘Human Terrain’


Did Gen. David Petraeus just call the Human Terrain System worthless? With a few choice sentences to the Wall Street Journal, the top commander in Afghanistan highlighted the disconnect between what the Army’s social science program is supposed to be doing — and what’s actually happening in the field.

“We have never had the granular understanding of local circumstances in Afghanistan that we achieved over time in Iraq,” Petraeus told the Journal. “One of the key elements in our ability to be agile in our activities in Iraq during the surge was a pretty good understanding who the power brokers were in local areas, how the systems were supposed to work, how they really worked.”

Under Gen. Petraeus’ predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization tried to overhaul its intelligence collection, to focus more on learning about individual tribes and local Afghan leaders. Gen. Petraeus said only now the military was getting an “understanding of local circumstances, customs and tribal relationships.”

Well, it’s a good thing there isn’t a four-year old program that is supposed to do exactly that. Indeed, while I’ve bitched about how ineffective the Human Terrain Teams really are, some of them do good work. Danger Room last year highlighted a hard-hitting Human Terrain System report discussing the dangers of going into an area without understanding it. The report said, in part:

‘Tribes’ in Afghanistan do not act as unified groups, as they have recently in Iraq. For the most part they are not hierarchical, meaning there is no “chief” with whom to negotiate (and from whom to expect results). They are notorious for changing the form of their social organization when they are pressured by internal dissension or external forces. Whereas in some other countries tribes are structured like trees, ‘tribes’ in Afghanistan are like jellyfish.

The problem is, no one knows about this kind of thing. Petraeus’ word choice—power broker, local systems, and so on—indicates that he has been affected by the efforts of the Human Terrain System to change, fundamentally, how we discuss local social organization in Afghanistan. But the fact that his commanders don’t feel like they’ve gotten this sort of insight from HTS indicates the program is still failing at its most fundamental task.

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Professor McChrystal’s Lectures: ‘Navigating Politics, Media,’ Irony

We know Stanley McChrystal has a sense of humor. Starting this semester, we’ll find out how advanced his sense of self-awareness is.

McChrystal handled his firing from the Army by poking fun at his big mouth during his retirement ceremony in July. That was McChrystal’s only public appearance after his team carped about his bosses in the Rolling Stone profile that cost him his command in Afghanistan. That is, until next week, when the former four-star instructs a graduate seminar at Yale.

Yes, really. The Yale Daily News publishes McChrystal’s syllabus. To borrow a line McChrystal used at his retirement ceremony, some of his classes have the potential to be awkward. October 12’s class is titled “Navigating Politics.” November 2: “Loyalty, Trust and Relationships.” November 16: “Communicating the Story – the Media Environment.” Um.

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Pentagon Bulks Up Yemen’s Arsenal as Shadow War Grows


Yemen is the new Pakistan — well, at least it is to many in the Pentagon, the White House, and the intelligence community. U.S. spies think al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate is the most likely terrorist network to attack us, And just like last year’s $400 million U.S. “counterinsurgency fund” for Pakistan tried to get the Pakistani military al-Qaeda-specific weapons, the Pentagon’s already given Yemen $155 million dollars’ worth of copters, Humvees, radios and transport planes to contain the evolving terrorist threat. Look for all that to expand.

According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Central Command is pondering a $1.2 billion military-assistance package to Yemen covering the next five years. Just five years ago, the Defense Department dispensed less than $5 million to the benighted country on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula. But anywhere al-Qaeda goes, U.S. military money is sure to follow.

Neither U.S. Central Command nor the Office of the Secretary of Defense would discuss the contours of the hypothetical military-assistance package. But the current year’s aid bundle is instructive. Like what the U.S. gave Pakistan in 2009, it centers around stuff that small units can use on raids against terrorist cells.

That’s because the Yemeni army as a whole, in the assessment of one U.S. defense analyst, is a basket case. “You can’t rehab the whole Yemeni army. It’s too corrupt and too poorly trained,” says the Army War College’s W. Andrew Terrill. Better to focus on what elite units can do against the targets that the U.S. wants hit than to bankroll the total 75,000-man force in its on-again-off-again war with Houthi rebels in its northern provinces.

But with a larger defense package waiting in the wings, and the threat of more Yemen-trained underpants bombers creating public anxiety over Yemen, who knows whether the training mission will end up creeping. After all, the Pakistanis still covet F-16s to go after their Indian rivals — and the U.S. is providing them with 18 new ones this year.

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Why Bomb-Proofing Robots Might Be a Bad Idea (Updated)

Five years ago, troops in Iraq were lucky if they had a bomb-stopping jammer in their Humvee. Now, one company wants to outfit robots with the electronic countermeasures, to keep the machines safe from remotely-detonated explosives. But you’ve got to wonder whether outfitting the ‘bots with another $100,000 in classified tech kind of undermines the purpose of having a disposable army of machines to handle irregular war’s most dangerous work.

Qinetiq North America, makers of the Talon bomb-disposal robot, floated the concept at conference in Denver, Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger reports. The idea would be to strap a Thor portable jammer (.pdf) onto the 125-pound, three-foot tall robot.

Over 2,800 of the remote-controlled machines have been deployed to warzones around the world, picking up (and blowing up) improvised explosives, so the flesh-and-blood bomb squad can stay safely far away. In the process, thousands of Qinetiq’s and rival iRobot’s machines have been wounded in action — or destroyed entirely. In Iraq, the robots’ sacrifices became so well-known that the insurgents started target the machines, in order to draw out their human operators. (In Baghdad, for instance, I saw one ‘bot narrowly escape a pair of rocket-propelled grenades.)

So there’s a logic to protecting these robots, by giving them the safety of a radio-frequency jammer. The $108,000 devices interrupt the signals that insurgents use to set off the bombs from afar.

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Sailors, Contractors Face Off Over ‘Hostage’ Network

Normally, it’s hard to get anyone but the geeks fired up about information infrastructure. But the Navy Marine Corps Intranet isn’t your normal network. With 700,000+ seats, it’s the world’s second-biggest network, after the internet itself. NMCI’s technical complexities and hiccups are the stuff of dark legend around the Navy. The fights it’s sparked between the military and its main contractor, Electronic Data Systems (now owned by Hewlett-Packard), have been epic. And then there’s that contract; after paying out $10 billion, the Navy still doesn’t own a single router. So it’s giving HP another $3.3 billion dollars — a “hostage” payment, as one Department of the Navy civilian put it, mostly so the military can buy the gear and look at the network blueprints sailors and marines have used for a decade.

So maybe it’s not so surprising that our item on NMCI’s next phase triggered so many heated — and passionately smart — responses. In the comments section, we heard from sailors, from marines, from HP employees, and interested observers, too. Here’s a sample:

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Vets Get Ecstasy to Treat Their PTSD

A pair of psychiatric experts think they’ve got the answer to the soaring number of troops coming back from war with PTSD: have them undergo intensive psychotherapy — while they’re rolling on ecstasy.

Dr. Michael Mithoefer and Anne Mithoefer, a psychiatric nurse, are the South Carolina pair who’ve been spearheading research into ecstasy, known clinically as MDMA, since 2000. After one successful study on 21 PTSD patients between 2004 and 2008, they’ve now received the final okay from FDA and DEA officials to start a study entirely devoted to former military service members.

“My sense is that, especially after we published the results of the first study, these institutions are more open to the idea,” Dr. Michael Mithoefer tells Danger Room. “Obviously, this is still new and experimental, and it can take time to get through to big institutions.”

With $500,000 in funding from MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), the two are recruiting 16 veterans — they’re hoping for a 50-50 split between men and women, and want most of the participants to have been diagnosed within the last 10 years.
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A Month In, Pakistan Flood Relief Efforts Stuck at 1.0

A month after the Haiti earthquake, the U.S. government had over 20,000 troops on the ground, $450 million in assistance money earmarked, and an innovative web-based system to let troops and aid workers collaborate like never before. A month after the floods in Pakistan, the U.S. effort doesn’t compare in any way. And that’s a major problem, considering Pakistan may be the most strategically significant country on the planet right now.

The flood waters along the southern reaches of the Indus River are starting to recede. But with 20 percent of Pakistan still underwater, some of the lessons of Haiti for civilian-military coordination look like washouts. In Haiti, the U.S. military, civilian agencies and non-governmental organizations made innovative use of information technology and social media, partnering in ways that were closer than in previous disaster-relief efforts — and certainly closer than the military has ever worked with civilians in such a context.

But it’s not putting those lessons to use in Pakistan. “No one has spoken to us,” says an officer with the U.S. Southern Command, the regional command in charge of Haiti’s earthquake relief, somewhat surprised by the lack of interest in learning how the military in Haiti opened up its reconnaissance and data-sorting tools to civilian partners.

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Spin War Shift: Military Now Bragging About Afghan Air Strikes

18 months after cutting back on air strikes, NATO is all-but-bragging about killing insurgents from the skies. In a stream of press releases, the military alliance in Afghanistan is boasting about the air-induced demise to 12 insurgents in the past 10 days. It’s the latest move in a spin war with the Taliban about civilian casualties, one that contrasts the air strikes’ “precision” with the insurgents’ “barbarism.”

Reporters woke up this morning to an emailed report from the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command (yeah, those guys) about a “successful” air strike in Kandahar. The strike occurred Monday in an “open, unpopulated field” following an intelligence operation to track a supposed Taliban commander named Zulmai. “After careful planning to ensure no civilians were present, coalition aircraft engaged the insurgents, killing Zulmai and another insurgent, and wounded the other,” the press release reads.

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White House: Iraq Troops Are Coming Home In 2011. Period.

When President Obama announces tonight that the remaining 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are going to all come home by the end of 2011, that endpoint for the Iraq war will be set in bureaucratic and diplomatic stone, according to a top adviser.

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes waves off recent media speculation that the U.S. and the Iraqi government might renegotiate a 2008 bilateral accord governing the ultimate exodus of U.S. troops from Iraq. “We’re going to honor that agreement,” Rhodes tells Danger Room during a conference call this afternoon. “Our view is that both of our governments are bound to it.”

Obama will announce at 8 p.m. eastern times that Operation Iraqi Freedom, the combat mission in Iraq that began on March 19, 2003, has ended. In it’s place: a year-long residual mission geared around training Iraqi forces and the odd Special Forces-led counterterrorism hit. But the insurgency, though far less lethal than before, has still proven able to carry out coordinated attacks, giving rise to some fears that the 600,000-strong Iraqi army and police aren’t yet capable of taking over. Still, according to a “time horizon” that the Iraqi government compelled the Bush administration to accept in 2008 in the so-called Status of Forces Agreement, the U.S. military’s presence in Iraq runs out on December 31, 2011.
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