The Worm's Eye View

War Is Boring has a nice dispatch from the front that offers some grunt-level perspective on the leadership change and the daily grind in Afghanistan.

The now infamous Rolling Stone article generated an instant firestorm surrounding the comments of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. But as Blake Hounshell notes at Foreign Policy, many people miss a notable part of the article: nine years in, the grunts at the bottom are losing faith in their leadership.

At COP Baraki Barak, raising the subject of COIN and the inevitable risk it brings to soldiers brings shrugs and reminders of the deep commitment soldiers have to obeying orders, no matter how stupid — on the record. Off the record, when the soldiers speculate freely on their superiors attributes, many are brutal: they’ve forgotten their
roots, they’ve sold their souls for political expediency, they misinterpret the situation, they aren’t paying attention, their hearing is selective, they are Olympic-level idiots.

By: Brant