Customer Reviews

Not a Good Day to Die : The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda

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Not a Good Day to Die is a must read for anyone who wants to understand what we should really be focusing on to change in our current military if we want to stay relevant in a future that will almost certainly be marked by uncertainty. I am a Reserve Officer who just returned from Iraq and I couldn't believe how many of the lessons I had highlighted in Naylor's book, were still relevant on the ground in Iraq. My son sent me a blog from an unknown author who I would love to thank because he sums up what I believe to be the seminal lesson from Not a Good Day to Die, and the key point we should focus on to improve our military in the future.

A brief discussion about the decisionmaking structure of U.S. land forces. The most remarkable examination of this topic is Sean Naylor's recent book on Operation Anaconda, an American effort in 2002 to trap and destroy a force of hundreds of al Qaeda warriors in a valley in Afghanistan. Naylor's book, Not a Good Day to Die, is far too detailed to come close to summarizing here. But two themes reappear throughout Naylor's narrative.

First, the American military has grown higher headquarters like weeds in rich soil. Meetings over Operation Anaconda, a single operation planned for three days and thought to be aimed against 200 enemy, involved absurd numbers of competing organizations -- and, therefore, competing operational styles and agendas. Here's a typical laundry list for a single meeting: "Representatives from K-Bar, the CIA, Task Force 11, CFLCC, the Coalition and Joint Civil-Military Operations Task Force, and Task Force Rakkasan had been invited." And this list is hardly a complete reflection of all the different headquarters involved in Anaconda. As Naylor summarizes: "For a battle that would involve perhaps 2,000 allied troops -- less than a brigade's worth -- in combat, CENTCOM had cobbled together a force that drew elements from eight countries, two U.S. Army divisions, two Special Forces groups, a hodgepodge of aviation units, and a variety of clandestine organizations." Each piece of that stew had its own leadership, with its own agenda and intent. A critical American military effort had become wildly and pointlessly complicated. Four-star generals reviewed plans down to the platoon level.

Second, the coordination of those many different elements and agendas meant that painfully negotiated plans became locked into place simply because they were painfully negotiated. After members of a Delta Force team pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of walking up the side of a mountain in the Afghan winter to get a firsthand look at the valley, operation leaders received reports that there were somewhere around 1000 enemy, not the 200 the American plans had called for -- and then they learned further that the enemy was not in the valley, where the plans put them, but were instead on the high ground around it. Leaders of the battle decided to go ahead with the plan as written, reluctant to throw out weeks of hard-fought staff work on the word of Lt. Col. Peter Blaber's Delta operators. The plans trumped reality, because the plans had come with political and institutional costs.

Finally, one of the ways that Army officers managed the problem of ignoring the Delta Force intelligence showing 1000 enemy on the high ground was to regard the special operators who delivered that intelligence as out-of-control and untrustworthy. Leaders ridiculed the Delta team reports, and "mocked the independent role that Blaber had carved out by calling him 'Peter the Great' and 'Colonel Kurtz.'" The enforcement of institutional orthodoxy allowed leaders to ignore realistic bad news. Today's U.S. Army in a nutshell, right there.

There's much more to Naylor's book, which is so far one of the very few critical pieces of insight into the current American wars. (The battle, by the way, went poorly.)

To summarize, then -- sorry about that -- a too-hierarchical, too-orthodox U.S. Army, and U.S. military in general, leans heavily on lumbering equipment, high technology, and major ground offensives against an enemy that relies on tactics that are often not even conventionally military in nature; we mass artillery against threatening letters and infrastructure sabotage. In equipment, doctrine, tactics, and leadership structure, we're organized for the wrong enemy, in ways that can't be easily or quickly changed.

Mr. Naylor is a reporter with Army Times who has covered the military for many years. He displays an insider's understanding as to how military organizations plan and fight. This book is unique in the degree to which the author was able to get the participants to be interviewed; there are a great many details here you won't find anywhere else. He does a great job on the account of Anaconda, a large raid into a mountain stronghold in southeast Afghanistan, conducted in early 2002.

The author covers the planning for Anaconda, the infighting among different organizations, and the significant impact the Secretary of Defense's office had as the numbers of conventional forces were limited due to political considerations. Special operators, generals, infantrymen, apache gunship pilots, all have their voices heard. What happens when plans fall apart and soldiers have to pick up the pieces? It's all in here.

This is the best account of the Army post 9/11 that has been written, and it is highly unlikely you'll find one better anytime soon. A must read. If you have any interest in the military or national security, pick this up.

The book is broken into four sections: the leadup to the operation, the first contact, the ranger battle, then conclusion. The first section is about 180 pages and is a bit of snoozer. The author explains, what appears to be, every single aspect behind every decision made prior to Anaconda. He goes into excruciating detail about the "office politics" between the various military groups. At one point, it starts sounded like a soap opera as various loyalities and internal factions are explained. It was bad enough for me to skim a few pages. It feels like the author had to fill some pages and pad the book.

One thing that stuck out was how LONG the prep work for the operation took. The book starts off "in the first weeks of January." The operation kicked off on 2 March. That seems like a long time to this untrained observer.

I did like hearing about the local Delta operator and how he planned and ran the three recce teams. He was bold and daring.

Things start picking up during the second section, "Reaction to Contact." As the first troopers hit the ground, the author reeled me in with vivid details of landscape, battles, and the troopers. The insider report of the friendly-fire incidents boiled my blood. When the author talks about the Afghan trucks driving across the mountainside in the dark and WITHOUT lights, I was shocked. Descriptions of the landscape are detailed. At one point, I lost track of all the different units moving around.

The third section is the climax. It deals with the battle on Takur Ghar. That was the payoff. Once I reached that section, I couldn't put the book down. When the SEAL commander sent the first helo to an LZ on TOP of the mountain, I was stunned. The author communicates the troopers frustration with the poor communication clearly -- I actually got mad when the General Trebon took command of the battle on Takur Ghar. There are some details about that battle that didn't make it into the newspaper accounts I read. For that alone, it is worth the read. Gritty, gripping, and packed with suspense.

The author does great work explaining how the battle on the mountain unfolded and the actions of all the troopers. Reading how the SEALs dragged their wounded comrades down a mountain or how the second QRF had to scale a mountain with a 70 degree slope while wearing 100lbs of gear...wow. The Ranger commander should have gotten a couple of medals for his bravery.

The pictures in the book were brilliant. There are a couple from Takur Ghar that, when viewed after reading the corresponding section, are just stunning.

All in all, it was a good read, despite the first section.

Not a Good Day to Die is clearly the equal to the likes of Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers...Once and Young, and Thunder Run. The book is simply one of the finest accounts of modern combat that has ever been written. With that being said however, it is difficult, in a short narrative, to describe all of the troubling aspects about Operation Anaconda. The book illustrates, only too clearly, the fallacy of the term "unity of command" that the services bandy about and the consequences that result when there was, in fact, no "unity of command" in Afghanistan at least where Anaconda was concerned. Not a Good Day... depicts the failure to understand, despite the marvels of modern technology, that even a subset of ground battle cannot be run from thousands of miles away by an Air Force general officer who doesn't understand what is transpiring on the battlefield, even the nature of ground combat, and who will not listen to the people on the ground who do understand what is taking place. Equally as troubling was the apparent prohibition by Rumsfeld and Franks prohibiting, in an attempt to reduce the size of the American footprint, the Army from employing the fire support needed by the infantry - a constraint not placed on Al Qaida. Troubling also was the ad-hoc nature with which the Army slapped together disparate units while attempting to achieve a certain level of manning and the desire to put an Afghan face on the battle. Also shown is that while there is clearly a role for precision guided munitions such as the JDAM they are not a replacement for integral fire support nor will close air support always be available when needed - as was the case of the AC-130 gunships which were not permitted, according to Air Force directives during Anaconda, to fly support missions in daylight. Troubling also is the apparent belief, by some, that "boat guys" (SEALS) can be given a "shake and bake" course and turned into infantrymen. A couple of SEAL units performed outstandingly-overall however, as a Team, the SEALS were found to be wanting. While the military declares Anaconda a success, it, like the earlier operation at Tora Bora, appears to have allowed most of the Al Qaida fighters in the Shahikot area to slip away to fight another day.

This is a superb book about the fateful Operation Anaconda in the mountains of Afghanistan. As the author mentioned, it was a very complex set of events and the book must have been extremely difficult to write. Combat operations are like car wrecks, there are as many perspectives as witnesses. War is a dynamic set of events that are filled with improbable occurrences. For this reason it is most important to have excellent communication and coordination. During this operation both communication and coordination were lacking. This starts from the top on down. The President and the Secretary of Defense (SecDEf ) are to blame in both planning and distracting the top generals from combat operations. As William Kristol of the Weekly Standard put it, Rumsfeld's fundamental error is that his theory about the military is at odds with the president's geopolitical strategy. He wants this light, transformed military, but there is a real war to win, which involves using many troops and equipment to rebuild a critical region of the world. Thus the reluctance of the high command to commit the appropriate number of conventional troops and assets can be traced to this fundamental error Kristol refers. The book reflects this fact.

A brief summary of significant items of critical concern and lessons to be learned are as follows:

1. Overall strategy was that U.S. commanders were reluctant to put many American troops on the ground and had relied on their Afghan allies backed up by Special Forces. The American's faith were misplaced and the Afghan allies were not sufficient to block Osama bin Laden and his henchmen from escaping. Ref. page 10.
2. General Franks declined to commit conventional troops to stop enemy fighters from escaping, causing the fight to slip through Hagenbeck's fingers. Ref. page 12.
3. Special Forces had been created as part of the Army since 1952 and were treated as a bastard child. This did not keep CENTCOM from ensnaring Special Forces in a confusing and often conflicting chain of command that had nearly disastrous results. Ref. page 14.
4. There was no coordination between the Navy Seals and the Army Rangers. Both are excellent in their environments, but they operate differently.
5. The book is filled with complaints of lack of air support. On page 136 the author writes about Lieutenant General Chuck Wald, being the CFACC commander being replaced by Lieutenant General T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley. Wald had a background of flying the F-15E Strike Eagle, which is a ground attack role, and he understood the complex business of close air support. Moseley came from flying the F-15C, an air superiority fighter who had no experience in ground support. Wald had done an outstanding job and the change of commanders was made during the very complex, never-before-done operation in Afghanistan.
6. To augment the situation furthermore, Moseley and the CFLCC commander, Lieutenant Mikolashek had a personality conflict that trickled down through their respective organizations. To make matters worse, during the critical last week of February, when Moseley should have been working with Mikolashek's and Hagenbeck's headquarters, Moseley was not at his desk at Prince Sultan Air Base, but was touring capitals in the CENTCOM region laying the diplomatic groundwork for the war with Iraq (page 271).
7. As the author points out on page 132, there is an advantage to ground troops having artillery, especially if air support is in question. Especially during the daytime operations when the AC-130s could not operate and the enemy was the most active. At least a few artillery pieces would have relieved the burden of the daytime enemy attacks.
8. The Pentagon thinking that the war in Afghanistan was all but won and victory was assured. The belief was that the enemy resistance had all but collapsed. Intelligence agencies assessed that the enemy would not stand and fight (page 120).
9. This resulted in a loose organization being assembled with no definite chain of command and conflicting goals, operation tactics, and missions.
10. The commanders in the field had limited exposure to CENTCOM in Tampa, Florida because of morning and afternoon meeting with SecDEf every morning and afternoon. The field commanders were not allowed to communicate with the CENTCOM starting two ours before the meeting, making most of the day unavailable to the field commanders.
11. On page 303 the author describes the Air Force general Trebon, who had never commanded a ground combat operation before, was making tactical reconnaissance decisions.
12. The TF Blue officer Lieutenant Commander Vic Hyder is described on pages 300-323 as the one who made the fateful mistake of Takur Ghar. The author pointed out that Hyder by-passed Lt. Col. Pete Blaber, who was still in command of the APO.

The author looses one star with use of acronyms and military jargon that is hard to follow. The reader must read halfway through the book to figure some of the terms and references. For the people involved directly in the operation, these terms would probably be easy to comprehend. This is understandable trying to write about such a complex operation with so many misfires and events. I highly recommend this book for everyone trying to understand what is often not reported in the news. The author did an excellent job of piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with a million pieces.

This is the most engaging book on war since Grant's Memoirs. Because Naylor exposes the guts and brains of those responsible for the Operation Anaconda disaster, it easily puts to shame virtually all contemporary classics and sets a new standard of military literature. No author has labored more diligently to digest the feelings of those who were actually in the mountain fight or those who boggled its direction from inception to execution. Because Naylor was embedded with the 101st, he had access no other observer can match. It's no surprise that those commanding CENTCOM, SOCOM and JSOC blocked official cooperation until they themselves were replaced. Naylor explains for the first time why Pentagon leadership, with the concurrence of General Franks, refused Army requests to deploy tube artillery and more Apaches into Afghanistan, once conventional forces were inserted into the fight. There is an ugly side to war--a truly violent and repugnant aspect that few have ever captured so persuasively. So long as civilizations wage war, this book is timeless. It captures more than courage and bad luck--it explains who's responsible for things that went right and what went wrong, horribly wrong.

Great book that provides additional detail on the GWOT. This book provides insights and detail that is in direct contravention with what has been written in "American Soldier". As an Ex Planner in CFLCC during some of this period this book brings to light some of the intrigue that we both experienced and suspected had been occuring at major command levels and within the administration. If you want a real idea of what is going on, dont read Franks, that is a glossed over politically correct intrepretation that barely devotes a few pages to this major operation. BUY Sean Naylor and you will not regret the purchase.
Terry Tucker, Prof of Military Studies and History (US Army, SGM, Armor, Ret.)

This book recounts the battle in the Shahikot Valley, in which the US Army and Navy Seals fought the toughest battle they'd seen since the battle of Mogadishu in 1993. The idea was for a newly formed unit of Afghan Military Forces (AMF) soldiers to push into this valley from the west while two battalions of the 101st Airborne (Air Mobile) Division, and one battalion from the 10th Mountain Division, landed on the far slopes of the valley with the hope of blocking the escape of the Al Qaeda forces thought to be hiding in the valley. Special Forces teams would be infiltrated into the valley from various directions, taking up observation posts on positions that gave them good overviews of the surrounding terrain.

The whole thing went wrong from the start. The AMF fell apart while approaching the valley, and never entered it until after the real fighting was over. When the American forces helicoptered into the valley, they discovered that instead of the Al Qaeda and Taliban forces hiding in the villages as expected, they were instead on the slopes of the ridges that surrounded the valley. One of the original groups of soldiers had to move out after the first day, taking too much fire from things such as mortars, which they couldn't counter because they only had their rifles and machineguns. The only heavier weaponry they had was a few mortars of their own, and air support.

The fighting went reasonably well at first. One Special Forces operator (as a soldier member of this elite unit is typically known) was killed in a friendly fire incident by an Air Force gunship, and a number of soldiers were wounded, but generally casualties were light. Unfortunately, halfway through the battle the higher-ups decided to change who was in command of the Special Forces involved. The new commander was a Seal determined to get his guys into the fight, and in a tragedy (you can't call this a comedy) of errors, the Seals tried to land on top of one of the highest local hills, where apparently pretty much everyone knew there were a lot of enemy soldiers and weaponry. The result was predictable: helicopters were shot down, men killed, and utter confusion reigned. After the Seals got into trouble on top of the mountain, the Army's Quick Reaction Force, a platoon of Rangers, was sent onto the same hilltop, and of course things just got worse. By the time things were sorted out 9 men were dead, more wounded, and three helicopters had been shot down, one not even leaving the hill itself.

Author Naylor obviously knows whereof he speaks. An Army Times reporter, he was embedded with troops who participated in the fighting, sat in on conferences where the operational plan wsa discussed, and interviewed a large number of participants at both the command level, and among the "trigger-pullers". Naylor spends a lot of time discussing the planning of the operation, from the composition of the task force involved to the chain of command to the presence (or absence) of various types of unit during the battle. Just about exactly half of the book is devoted to the planning and recconniasance of the valley. While the author takes issue with some of the decions made by the commanders, he is (contrary to some of the other reviewers on Amazon) pretty even-handed in his treatment of the Navy Seals who participated in the battle. He makes the point that they don't train for exactly the same sort of combat as the Army's Special Forces do, and that this somewhat weakened them, but he also gives credit where credit is due: one of the Seal teams started the fighting by knocking out an enemy DshK heavy machinegun which was in position to shoot down the helicopters full of troops entering the valley.

The author makes several good points about the way the fight was managed. First, the command structure was completely ad hoc, with a stripped down brigade staff controlling one battalion of its own and two from another division, groups from two services (Army and Navy Seals) attempting to coordinate with the regular soldiers, and everyone trying to coordinate their actions with the Air Force and the AMF, who were unused to fighting in the American style. The result was at times a complete disaster when it came to coordination and control, and left everyone frustrated.

A lot has been made of the comparison between this book and Mark Bowden's book Blackhawk Down. Frankly I think the comparison a disservice to both books. Bowden's book is a gripping you-are-there sort of thriler, with little on the larger aspects of the fighting. Bowden's a reporter for a civilian publication, and while he's a good writer, his understanding of the military isn't that much more than superficial. Naylor, by contrast, isn't quite the writer that Bowden is, but his understanding of the military and especially the army is much better. This gives him, and therefore his readers, a good understanding of the intricacies of Army and Pentagon politics, and how they effect what happees in the field.

For those as well as many others, this is a valuable book on Operation Anaconda, and the things that went wrong in it. I would recommend it.

Naylor does a fine job in laying out, organizing, and conveying a massive amount of research and interviews in order to compile this thrilling account of Operation Anaconda. If you liked "Black Hawk Down," you won't be disappointed by this book by Sean Naylor. The books are not only similar in style - both are superb accounts of gut-wrenching combat - but are unfortunately similar in their depictions of Headquarters incompetence and the tragic loss of lives they cause the men fighting the battle.

The 1993 street battles in Mogadishu and the March 2002 assault on hundreds of al Qaeda fighters and Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan's Shahikot valley had almost too much in common: ad hoc mixes of foreign, conventional and special operations forces, confusing command-and-control regimes, an underestimated and determined foe, poor battlefield intelligence and downed helicopters with wounded soldiers whose predicament threatened to foil the entire mission.

Thankfully, the other similarity between these stories is in the extraordinary tales of American battlefield valor, ingenuity, tactical leadership and creative thinking. Knowing that men like Speedy, Slab, Bob, Goody, and Pete Blaber are out there protecting the country will give you peace of mind, especially when you realize the bureaucratic obstacles they had deal with and probably still have to navigate to be successful. The book conveys that it was the U.S. Grunts, special operators, aviators and Afghan militia who got the job done and broke the back of last significant pocket of al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

In Operation Anaconda - which took place a few months after the more celebrated battle of Tora Bora - a hodgepodge of U.S. special operations forces, Aghan tribal allies and a few American infantry units tried to flush out hundreds of experienced al Qaeda fighters holed up in a remote valley of Eastern Afghanistan.

After the initial invasion of Afghanistan most of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces had fled or dissolved under the combination of precision American airpower, and aggressive special operators guided by their allied militia armies. The Americans had no reason to believe that this time would be any different.

What they found in the Shahikot, much to their dismay, was a much bigger force of determined and superbly trained guerrillas entrenched in prepared positions that had been occupied in many other battles and using simple tactics and weapons in ways that no intelligence sources predicted.

To compound their critical intelligence failures, the Americans originally chose to fight 'the plan' instead of fighting the battle based on the terrain and the enemy dispositon - if not for Blaber and his highly skilled teams of SEALs and DELTA recon elements the battle may have turned out to be a historic defeat for the American Army. Eventually the Army Grunts made the necessary improvisations to accomplish their mission on a radically different battlefield than the one for which they had planned.

The American forces eventually gained the upper hand through supreme effort and courage, which Naylor (who was embedded with one of the infantry units) describes with admirable balance. The mission's main drama centers around an incident involving the rescue effort focused on a Navy SEAL who fell out of a Helo, and results with the crashes of two MH-47 helicopters, eight more deaths and numerous serious casualties.

Many reviews I have read criticize the book for being overly critical of the SEAL's, I wonder if they actually read the book, because it seems like one of Naylor's undisputed hero's during the battle were the SEAL's who took out the AQ position and Machine-gun before the Infantry Helo's flew in. Naylor did find the SEAL HQ personnel to be seriously deficient, but exposes the same incompetence in the Special Operations and Air Force HQ's involved in the battle.

This excellent tale could be helped by a few more maps and a bit more reflection from Naylor on the strategic lessons learned from Anaconda.

Without a doubt, this is the most definitive account of Operation Anaconda and the firefight on Takur Ghar (aka Roberts Ridge). The author was in Afghanistan and attached to the units that conducted the operation. He interviewed dozens and dozens of people who were there from the top generals to the basic squad leaders.

The author does not throw politics (anti-Bush/anti-War) issues into the book. He does lay out a clear sequence of how and why things went the way they did during this battle. He offers critical comments by one source and then allows another source to counter the criticism.

My only minor issue is that there are so many important people mentioned in this book that I sometimes found it hard to keep track of who was who even with the help of a printed list in the beginning of the book. It also takes about the first 1/3 of the book to cover all the issues that developed during the planning stage, but it is key in helping the reader understand the flow and confusion that resulted in the battle.

There is a line in the book that sums it up in that sometimes no matter how well intended all the planners were for this operation, tragedy still resulted. This book helps to show that the military is not a machine, but rather a human entity that is capable of making mistakes.