Matt Larsen describes some lessons learned early in the War on Terror:
As the team entered the second house the number one man seemed to be struggling with something as he went through the first door. The number two man, keying off of the direction taken by number one turned left, the opposite direction from number one which is the standard Close Quarters Battle (CQB) method, and the number three, SSG Miranda came in to follow number one who at this point was obviously engaged with someone. So as not to be stuck standing in the doorway, what is known in CQB as the fatal funnel because enemy fire will normally be concentrated there, Rich placed the palm of his non-firing hand on the back of number one and pushed him and the person he was tangled up with further into the room.
The enemy had a grip on the number one man’s weapon and was fighting to get control of it, although this was not clear to Miranda who was looking at the scene through the narrow green tinted view of his night vision goggles.
While struggling to gain control of his weapon, number one pulled on it as if to rip it out of enemy’s hands. This is known as the “Tug of War” technique, when an enemy has hold of your weapon by the barrel if you simply step back and pull, it will normally be pointed straight at him allowing you to shoot. In doing so he stepped slightly back and toward the center of the room.
With nothing now between him and the man number one had been struggling with, Miranda grasped him with his non-firing hand and using an advancing foot sweep tossed him easily into the center of the room.
At the same moment, with his weapon finally clear enough, number one fired a three round bust into the enemy. Unfortunately with Rich Miranda still grasping the enemy’s shirt, one of the rounds passed through his left arm before striking the enemy.
[…]
Miranda himself was one of the more experienced fighters in the entire Special Forces. He had been training, mostly on his own, for years and was an accomplished Judo player and kickboxer.
[…]
The bottom line was simple: their Combatives training and their mission training were separate. The CQB doctrine when the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started was that if a soldiers’ rifle malfunctioned they should either take a knee so teammates could cover their sector of fire, or transition to a sidearm. In practice neither option works inside the typical urban rooms we fought in, eight to ten feet end-to-end. When you go through that door, it isn’t a marksmanship contest. It is a fight! You shove the enemy against a wall or over furniture, wrestle for control, and then bring whatever weapon, rifle, pistol, or knife, you can to finish it.
Combatives is an inherent part of many types of missions, Close Quarters Battle in particular, and it must be treated as such. At the time, however, it was not. Doctrine and training treated Combatives as a separate, optional subject: role-players were occasionally used to simulate noncombatants, but live Combatives as a integral portion of mission training seldom if ever happened. The prevailing mindset came from leaders shaped by twenty years of peacetime habits who didn’t want to confront the realities of fighting in rooms. The doctrine they produced was weak and the soldiers who followed it were less prepared than they needed to be. Combatives and marksmanship address different ranges; without both integrated into mission training, teams were handicapped before they ever crossed the threshold.
The resistance started to fade as more and more Soldiers came to grips, literally, with the enemy.
So we got good at fighting wars we would lose (Afghanistan) or meander stupidly in (Iraq), which is also a loss.
Whoopie!
In Iraq (I was in Ramadi in ’05) and Afghanistan, we were funding the enemy or funding those who would fund the enemy instead of breaking the enemy’s back before we funded anyway. I guess Firebombing Dresden (or Baghdad) has fallen out of style.