Operation Anaconda: America’s First Major Battle in Afghanistan (review)

Smart bombs. Global positioning systems. Satellite communications and imaging. All of these modern technologies, one would assume, should make the execution of modern warfare very smooth; implementing battle plans, which is so dependent upon being in the right place at the right time, should be much simpler today than during the American Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, or even the Gulf War. But as Lester W. Grau and Dodge Billingsley’s work, Operation Anaconda: America’s First Major Battle in Afghanistan, demonstrates, this is definitely not true.

Merely two days into an American-led coalition’s first major battle in the war in Afghanistan, Captain Nate Self (U.S. Army) found himself and his men deep within the fog of war. Pre-battle assessments of the number of enemy forces and their weaponry were, for the most part, off their mark; the terrain was much too rugged for the type of training general infantrymen received; fighting occurred at high altitudes and time was not permitted for soldiers to adjust to the oxygen-depleted (less dense) atmosphere; helicopters dropped forces off in the wrong landing zones; communications between ground and air forces were inconsistent, resulting in occasional friendly fire, misdirected bombings, and other unfortunate incidents; and there was poor coordination among all of the services involved. For Self and the other forces engaged in the Shah-i-Kot valley during the opening sequence of Operation Anaconda, uncertainty was the only certainty. “There was a lot of chatter and conjecture” being broadcast about the U.S. military communications network “but very little fact” (243). Although U.S. and coalition forces had a lot of modern weaponry with which to fight, modern technology had done only so much to help American and coalition soldiers with the logistics of battle. In many ways, it is a surprise that the coalition actually won the fight for the Shah-i-Kot valley.

Although the book is not divided as such, there are two distinct parts to the text. The first part of the book (chapters 1–3) lays out the history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the relationship between the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and America’s plan to take down the Taliban regime. While it was informative, I am not sure that the authors needed to spend so much space (roughly eighty pages) providing as much detail as they did. Knowing the history of the region and the reasons for going into Afghanistan did little to help me understand what the majority of the book focuses on, namely the battle for the Shah-i-Kot valley. Conveying the fact that Taliban soldiers were familiar with the terrain, trained to improvise, and lived in a war-like state could have been achieved in one chapter instead of three.

There is a certain natural cohesiveness that a historian has when telling the history of large armies battling each other. Men are massed on the battlefield relatively close together in an attempt to overwhelm the enemy through the sheer force of bodies on the field, through tactical maneuvers, or some combination thereof. Smaller units that play important roles in larger battles can be highlighted, though their story is still usually directly related to the scope of the overall battle plan. The physical and logistical proximity of all the soldiers simply makes writing about the tactical aspects of warfare a little easier. This “ease” for a historian, however, does not hold true when battles are fought using disparate groups of sometimes inadequately armed soldiers. The second part of the book (chapters 4–8) presents a superb account of how Operation Anaconda unfolded, from inception to culmination, over a two-week period in March 2002; Grau and Billingsley adeptly and straightforwardly recount what must have been bordering on pandemonium for the soldiers.

The combined military forces looking to take the Shah-i-Kot...