What Marine Raiders Said After Watching the SASR Clear a Compound the CIA Had Marked Impossible
The CIA’s targeting assessment for the compound in the Arusan province of Afghanistan, produced in the late summer of 2006, was a document of genuine operational intelligence, thorough, well sourced, and internally consistent in its analytical conclusions. The compound was assessed as a significant Taliban command node used for planning, communications, and logistical coordination for operations in the central Afghanistan theater.
The intelligence that supported this assessment included signals intercept, human intelligence from several source categories, and imagery analysis that had tracked movement to and from the compound over a period of months. The intelligence was solid. The operational conclusion the assessment reached that the compound was too heavily defended to be addressed by a directaction assault was reached through a force structure analysis that measured the compound’s estimated defensive strength against the typical assault package available to
ISAF and coalition forces in the province. The analysis was methodologically sound. It was also analyzing the wrong assault package. The package it had not analyzed was the one the Sasser brought to the problem. The second squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment had been operating in Afghanistan since the beginning of the coalition commitment in late 2001, rotating through the country in a deployment cycle that brought Australian special operations capability to bear on the specific mission set that the Arusan
province required. By 2006, the SASSR had accumulated years of operational experience in the Afghan environment that gave their operational planning a specific contextual precision. They understood the specific terrain of Arusen, the Wadi systems that created approach corridors, the orchard belts that provided cover and concealment for movement, the specific acoustic and visual characteristics of the compound structures that populated the provincial landscape.
They understood the human environment, the population patterns, the tribal structures, the specific intelligence relationships that patient engagement with local communities produced. They had the kind of environmental knowledge that only extended operational presence generates and they had developed it through years of working a province that many coalition forces had not committed to at the same depth.
The Marine Raiders, specifically elements of Marine Special Operations Command, Mars had been deployed to Afghanistan in the period following the initial expansion of the Special Operations Commitment in 2006. Their deployment brought a force with its own operational tradition and institutional culture into the coalition’s special operations environment.
The Raiders had their own history, their own selection and training standards, and their own institutional approach to the problems of direct action and special reconnaissance in the kinds of environments Afghanistan presented. They were capable and professional. They were also new to the specific environment of Arusen province and to the specific operational culture of the SASR unit they were working alongside.
The joint operations that brought the two forces together gave each a direct operational view of the others methods. What the Marine Raiders observed when the SASR approached the CIA assessed compound in Aruskan generated an assessment of their own that entered the informal professional knowledge of the Mars community with the weight that direct observation always carries.
The CIA assessment’s conclusion that the compound was inaccessible to direct action derived primarily from its estimate of the compound’s approach routes and their exposure to defensive fire. The assessment identified four approach vectors, estimated the defensive coverage of each, and concluded that none offered sufficient cover for an assault element to reach the compound walls without sustaining unacceptable casualties during the approach.
The assessment’s definition of an acceptable assault force, the force size and composition that the analysis assumed would be used, was the definition that the conventional military planning framework produced. A force large enough to suppress the defensive positions while a breach and clearance element moved on the objective with a support element providing fire support from a covering position.
Against those parameters, the compound’s defensive coverage was indeed problematic. Against a different set of parameters, a smaller team moving differently, exploiting the terrain differently, the calculation was different. The SASR planning cell’s approach to the compound used the same intelligence the CIA assessment had been built on and reached a different operational conclusion.
The difference was in the specific operational questions the SASR planners asked of the intelligence product. The CIA analysis had asked whether a conventional assault package could reach the compound. The SASR planners asked which specific approach used by a specific team with specific capabilities offered the combination of cover speed and surprise that made the compound addressable.
The question was narrower and more operationally specific. It produced a narrower and more operationally specific answer. There was an approach. It required a small team, a specific route through the orchard belt that the imagery analysis showed provided continuous cover for the critical approach distance, a timing that exploited a specific gap in the compound’s guard pattern that the signals intelligence had documented and a breach technique suited to the specific construction of the compound wall at the selected entry point. The
approach was demanding. It was not impossible. Before we dive in, drop a comment and let us know where you are watching from. If you haven’t already, make sure you hit the subscribe button to not miss any story. And check out our Patreon in the description. We post full uncensored stories there.
Every graphic detail, every brutal moment, nothing redacted, stories YouTube won’t allow. Now, let’s get into it. Chapter 2. The Marine Raiders who observed the SASR operation against the CIA assessed compound were watching from a position that the joint operational plan had designated as the fire support element. The team positioned to provide long range suppression if the assault element encountered resistance that it could not manage with organic weapons.
The observation position gave them a direct view of the SASR approach and once the assault began of the breach and clearance sequence as it developed against the compound’s defensive structure. What they observed was the specific execution of the operational concept that the SASR planning cell had developed against the CIA’s assessment, the small team, the covered approach route, the exploitation of the guard pattern gap, the fast breach.
They observed it in real time under actual operational conditions against an actual defended objective. The observation was more informative than any exercise replication could have been because it was happening against an actual target whose defenders were reacting to an actual threat. The SASR were not moving through a replicated compound.
They were moving through the compound the CIA had assessed as inaccessible. The specific Marine Raiders assessment of what they had watched varied by individual in its emphasis and expression as direct experience always does when filtered through different perceptions and professional frameworks. What was consistent across the accounts that entered the Mars institutional knowledge through the debrief process that followed the operation and through the informal professional discussions that the joint deployment generated was
the observation that the SASR had approached and cleared a promising compound that the available assessment had characterized as beyond the reach of direct action and had done so with a team size and an operational methodology that fell outside the parameters the assessment had used to reach its conclusion.
The observation was not a critique of the CIA assessment. The CIA assessment had used the parameters it had been given. The SASR had provided different parameters derived from a different operational tradition and a different approach to the problem of what a small team with precise intelligence and specific environmental knowledge could accomplish against a defended compound in terrain.
They understood the different parameters produced a different outcome. The compound in Aruskan yielded the intelligence product that the targeting assessment had identified as its operational value. The materials, the communications equipment, the personnel, and the documents recovered during the SASR clearance gave the coalition intelligence structure the specific product that months of collection against the compound had suggested it contained.
The recovery of that product was the operational purpose of the assault. The assessment had said the assault was not feasible. The assault had been conducted. The product had been recovered. The assessment had been wrong not in its analysis of the target, but in its analysis of the specific force capability available to address it.
The force capability available was not the force capability the assessment had used in its analysis. It was the SASR. The SASR’s capability was not adequately captured by the assessment’s force structure parameters. The gap between the capability that was available and the capability the assessment had assumed was the specific gap in which the entire operational outcome existed.
The Mars and Sasser relationship that developed through the Arusen deployment produced joint operational experience that both organizations drew on in subsequent planning and operations. The specific lesson that the Marine Raiders took from observing the compound assault was not a lesson about the SASR’s physical courage or individual operator quality, though both were evident.
It was a lesson about the specific operational planning methodology that produced an assault on a compound that the existing assessment had characterized as inaccessible. the methodology of building the operational concept from the specific capabilities of the specific team rather than from a generic force structure model that might not reflect what the specific team could do.
The lesson was applicable to Mars’s own operational planning. It was absorbed through the professional culture that makes direct observation the most effective form of institutional learning available to military organizations. The CIA had marked the compound impossible. The SASR had cleared it. The Marine Raiders had watched.
The watching had been the education. The SASR’s operational presence in Afghanistan after 2001 was built on a foundation of institutional preparation that extended back through the regiment’s history in ways that shaped its specific effectiveness in the NASA Afghan environment. The regiment had operated in jungle and desert environments across multiple decades.
Had developed its reconnaissance and direct action capabilities through operational deployments and training exercises that kept the capability current and applicable and had maintained the selection and continuation training standards that produced operators capable of the specific demands that sustained operations in austere and hostile environments imposed.
The Afghan deployment tested these capabilities in a specific combination of altitude, cold, complex terrain, and determined enemy that was in some respects more demanding than the training had simulated. The operators who deployed to Afghanistan had been prepared for demanding environments. They had not been specifically prepared for this demanding environment. They adapted.
The adaptation was faster because the foundation was more solid. The relationship between the SASSR and the American forces they operated alongside in Afghanistan was shaped by the specific operational context that the coalition campaign created and by the institutional relationships that the SASR had developed through previous joint operations and exercises.
The SASR had worked alongside American special operations forces in training exercises in Australia and in the United States, had participated in joint exercises in the Pacific theater that had developed mutual understanding of each other’s methodologies and capabilities, and had built the specific professional relationships that made joint operational planning and execution possible.
The Afghan deployment converted those training relationships into operational ones, which is the conversion that determines whether training relationships actually produce operational value. The conversion was successful. The SASR and their American partners operated effectively together in the specific conditions that Afghanistan presented.
The effectiveness was visible to everyone in the operational community who observed it and it generated the specific kind of professional assessment that direct operational observation produces. Not the assessment of capability from exercises but the assessment of capability from operations. The intelligence architecture that supported Sasser operations in Afghanistan during the early years of the campaign was the intelligence architecture of a coalition effort that was still developing the specific collection and fusion capabilities that
sustained counterinsurgency and direct action operations required. The collection was improving rapidly through the period of the SASR’s early deployments as the American intelligence community brought its full range of technical and human collection resources to bear on the Afghan environment and as the fusion processes that integrated those resources into actionable intelligence for the special operations community matured.
The SASR operated within this developing architecture, contributing their own national collection and their locally developed human intelligence to the combined picture and applying the combined picture to the specific operational requirements of their area of operations. The operational effectiveness they demonstrated was not the effectiveness of a force with perfect intelligence.
It was the effectiveness of a force that could operate with good intelligence against difficult targets and that could operate with imperfect intelligence against targets where the imperfection could be managed through the quality of the operational planning and execution. The institutional relationship between the Australian government’s strategic objectives in Afghanistan and the SASR’s operational activities in Arusen province was managed through the command structures that the coalition established for the southern and eastern
Afghanistan campaign. The SASR operated within those structures under the strategic direction of the coalition command and the operational direction of the combined joint special operations task force that coordinated special operations activities across the theater. The specific operations the SASR conducted were generated through the planning and targeting processes of the task force and the intelligence that supported those operations was the product of the combined collection architecture that the task force
managed. The SASR’s national character, their institutional identity as a uniquely Australian force with Australian strategic relationships to maintain did not prevent them from operating as an effective component of the multinational coalition. It gave them specific capabilities and perspectives that the multinational coalition benefited from having.
The Marine Raiders, who operated alongside the SASR in Arusan Province, brought to the joint operational environment the specific capabilities of a relatively young special operations organization that had been built on the foundation of Marine Corps combat experience and that was developing its special operations identity through exactly the kind of operational engagement that the Afghan deployment provided.
The Mars community in 2006 was not the Mars community of 2016 because a decade of operational experience had transformed an organization that was still building its institutional identity into an organization with a specific operational tradition shaped by its Afghan and Iraqi deployments. The joint operations with the SASR were part of that shaping experience.
What the Marine Raiders observed the SASR doing against the compound the CIA had marked impossible in the specific operational environment of Arusen province was not just a demonstration of Australian capability. It was a demonstration of what special operations forces could accomplish when they had been doing the work long enough to understand the specific environment they were working in and when their operational culture allowed them to define the problem correctly rather than defaulting to the parameters that a generic assessment would produce. The
lesson was applicable to Mars’s own development. It was absorbed through the specific medium of direct observation. The compound in Orus Gan was the classroom. The clearance was the lesson. The CIA’s reassessment of the compound’s accessibility after the SASR operation followed the standard analytical process for updating assessments in the light of new operational evidence.
The assessment had concluded that the compound was inaccessible. The operation had demonstrated that it was accessible. The reassessment identified the specific differences between the assessment’s assumptions and the operation’s actual parameters, the force size, the approach methodology, the timing, the intelligence products operational specificity, and produced an updated understanding of what was required to address similar compounds in similar environments.
The updated understanding was not a revision that discredited the original assessment. The original assessment had been accurate for the type of operation it had assessed. The operation had not been that type. The updated understanding accounted for the broader range of operational approaches that the Sasser’s operation had added to the analytical framework.
The framework was better for having been corrected by the operational record. The operational record had been generated by a team that had approached the compound from a direction the assessment had not considered. The SASR’s operational approach to the compound had not been built on the conviction that the CIA assessment was wrong.
It had been built on the conviction that the CIA assessment had assessed a different problem from the one the SASR was solving. The assessment had asked whether a conventional direct action package could address the compound. The SASR planning cell had asked whether a specific team approaching from a specific direction at a specific time using a specific technique could reach the compound before its defensive posture could react.
The two questions were related but not identical. And the different questions produced different operational analysis, different operational conclusions, and ultimately different operational outcomes. The SASR did not disregard the CIA’s assessment. They used it as input into a planning process that was asking a different question.
And the planning process’s answer to the different question was the operational concept that produced the assault. The concept was validated by the assault success. The assessment was corrected by the same evidence. The Marine Raiders, who had been positioned as the fire support element for the operation, understood the tactical layout in enough detail to assess in real time whether the assault was proceeding as planned.
Their position gave them direct observation of the approach phase, of the breach, and of the initial clearance sequence as it developed. What they observed was the SASR team moving through the approach corridor that the planning had identified with the pace and precision that indicated the movement was rehearsed and the terrain was familiar.
The breach was fast. The entry was clean. The fire that came from the compound’s defensive positions was engaged by the elements of the assault team designated for suppression before it could find the breach element. The compound was cleared. The intelligence product was recovered. The team withdrew to the extraction point.
The whole sequence confirmed the planning cells concept and refuted the CIA assessment’s conclusion. The Marine Raiders watched it happen. The watching was the education that no briefing or exercise could have produced with equivalent force. The specific tactical skills the SASR brought to the Arusan compound were skills the regiment had refined through years of direct action operations in the specific environment of southern Afghanistan.
Close quarters battle in mudbrick compound structures with the specific construction characteristics of poshune village buildings required specific techniques that the regiment had developed through operational experience. Understanding of how the specific materials responded to ballistic energy of the typical internal layouts and the specific ambush positions they created.
of the movement techniques that minimized exposure in the internal spaces while maintaining the speed that compound clearance required. The techniques were not improvised on the day of the operation. They had been developed over years of operating in compounds like the one the CIA had assessed as inaccessible. The assessment had not known about those years.
The assessment had worked from the target’s defensive characteristics and the conventional force structure parameters it had been given. It had not been given the SASR’s operational knowledge of the specific environment and the specific techniques that knowledge supported. The gap between what the assessment had and what the SASR brought was the gap in which the outcome existed.
The Mars community’s internal assessment of the operation was structured through the debrief process that followed the joint deployment. The debrief identified the specific elements of the SASR’s performance that had been most instructive, the planning methodology, the approach technique, the breaching sequence, the clearance drill, and documented them in the forms that Mars used for capturing operational lessons.
The documentation fed into the MARSOC training program development cycle where the specific lessons were assessed for applicability to MARSOC’s own operational requirements and translated into training objectives where the assessment determined they were applicable. The process was the standard process for extracting institutional value from joint operational experience.
It worked because the debrief was honest, the assessment was rigorous, and the training development process was responsive to the lessons the operations generated. The Marine Raiders who had watched the SASR clear the compound saw something that changed how they thought about certain operational problems.
The debrief captured what they had seen. The training program used what the debrief captured. The capability that resulted was more capable than the capability that had preceded the observation. The observation had been the catalyst. The compound in Arusen had been the classroom. The lesson was still being applied when the next deployment began.
The CIA’s reassessment of the compound’s accessibility after the SASR operation was conducted through the standard analytical process for updating assessments when new operational evidence contradicts the original conclusions. The reassessment was not primarily concerned with the specific compound which had been cleared and whose operational value to the target network had been eliminated.
It was concerned with the analytical framework with identifying whether the factors that had produced the erroneous assessment of inaccessibility were factors that were likely to produce similar errors in future assessments of similar targets. The review found that the primary error had been the use of a force structure assessment framework that did not adequately represent the full range of force capabilities available.
The framework had used generic parameters that corresponded to the average capability of the range of forces likely to be assigned such a mission. The SASR’s capability was not average. It was specific and the specificity was relevant to the specific problem the compound presented. The review recommended that future assessments of direct action feasibility against compounds in similar environments include explicit consideration of the specific force capabilities available rather than generic force structure parameters.
The recommendation was implemented. The assessments that followed it were more accurate. The SASR had not been trying to improve the CIA’s analytical methodology. They had been trying to clear a compound. The improvement of the methodology was a consequence of the clearance. The joint deployment to Arusan province was not the first time that Mars elements had operated alongside Sasser units and it was not the last.
The relationship between the two forces developed through the deployment cycle in the ways that operational relationships always develop through the accumulation of shared experience, through the specific professional respect that builds between forces that have observed each other perform under real conditions and through the informal personal relationships that individuals develop when they work alongside each other for extended periods in demanding environments.
The relationship was not frictionless. Two different institutional cultures with different operational traditions and different approaches to the specific problems of planning, command, and execution produce frictions when they operate together. The frictions were managed professionally by both sides because both understood that managing the frictions was a condition of producing the operational outcomes that both were deployed to produce.
The specific Sasser operators who planned and executed the Aruskan compound operation were not publicly identified after the operation, which was consistent with Australian special operations policy regarding the identification of serving operators. Their operational anonymity was maintained by the institutional culture and policy framework that the SASR applied to all of its operational activities.
The Marine Raiders who observed them could describe what they had seen. They could not identify the specific individuals whose performance they had observed. The institutional anonymity that protected the operators was an anonymity that extended to the operational record. The record documented the capability, not the individuals.
And the capability was what the institutional knowledge needed to preserve. The individuals who had demonstrated it moved on to the next deployment, the next operation, the next compound in the next valley. The capability remained. The institutional record held the capability. The individuals held the experience. The broader operational significance of the Arusan operation, its significance within the ISAF campaign in southern Afghanistan and within the development of Australian special operations capability and international recognition
was assessed at multiple levels in the period following the operation. At the tactical level, the clearing of a command node that had been assessed as inaccessible removed a specific operational capability from the Taliban network in the province and produced intelligence that fed the subsequent targeting cycle.
At the operational level, the demonstration of Sasser capability against an extremely difficult target strengthened the Sasser’s position within the ISAF Special Operations Task Force and supported the arguments for the Sasser’s continued deployment at the same operational tempo. At the strategic level, the operation contributed to the Australian government’s ability to demonstrate to its American ally that the Australian special operations contribution to the campaign was genuinely valuable and not merely symbolic. Each level of significance was
real. Each was recognized in the assessments that the operation produced. The Marine Raiders assessment was one of them. It was the most direct, the most operationally specific, and the most honest of the assessments produced because it was the assessment of people who had been there and who had watched with professional eyes what a capable force looked like when it was doing something that the available assessment had said it could not do.
The professional assessment that the Marine Raiders produced after the Arusan operation entered the Mars institutional knowledge at multiple levels. At the individual level, the operators who had observed the SASR compound clearance carried the specific knowledge of what they had seen into the rest of their operational careers into the planning discussions and the debrief sessions and the training exercises where what you have seen informs what you recommend, what you design, and what you expect from your own force and from your
allies. At the unit level, the debrief documentation captured the key observations in a form that could be accessed by MARSOC personnel who had not been present for the operation. At the institutional level, the training program review that the debrief triggered produced the specific modifications to Mars’s direct action planning methodology that the observation supported.
The knowledge moved through the organization in the ways that knowledge moves through professional military organizations, through people, through documents, and through the training process that converts both into capability. The compound in Arusen had been cleared. The knowledge of what clearing it had required had not been left in Arusen.
It had come home with the people who had watched it happen and it had been distributed through the institution in the form that made it most useful for the next time a similar problem presented itself in a similar environment. The next time came, the knowledge was there. The CIA assessment that had preceded the operation was corrected by the fact of the operation’s success.
The correction did not happen immediately or dramatically. Assessments are institutional products and institutional products change through institutional processes that operate on timelines longer than a single operational outcome. But the operational record was clear. It was documented and it was circulated through the intelligence community’s standard product distribution channels in the form of the afteraction intelligence assessment that the operations exploitation phase had generated.
The assessment documented what the compound had contained, what the assault had produced, and what the relationship between the operations outcome and the preceding assessment’s conclusions implied for the analytical framework that the assessment had used. The implication was that the framework needed revision. The revision was made.
The revised framework produced better assessments of subsequent targets in similar environments. The Marine Raiders observation and the SASR’s operation had been the catalyst for the revision. The revision had improved the intelligence product that future operations would be planned against.
The compound had been inaccessible in the assessment. It had been cleared in the operation. The assessment had been wrong. The operation had been right. The intelligence community had updated its analysis. The update had improved the product. The product had improved the operations. The operations had continued, the work had continued, the cycle had continued.
This was how institutional learning happened. when the institutions involved were serious enough to let the operational record correct the analytical framework rather than defend the framework against the record. The Marine Raiders who completed their Afghanistan rotation and returned to Camp Pendleton carried their assessment of the SASR with them in the way that direct operational experience always travels.
embedded in the specific professional vocabulary of people who have watched a capability demonstrated under conditions that make demonstration unambiguous. The SASR had not performed in a controlled exercise or a training environment. They had performed against a real compound that a real intelligence agency had judged unassalable.
and they had done it with a speed and precision that the Marine Raiders had not before that deployment seen replicated at that level. The assessment they brought back was not complimentary in the way that formal liaison reports are complimentary. The careful diplomatic language that Allied forces use to describe each other in official correspondence.
It was the specific technically grounded assessment that operators produce when they have watched another unit work in conditions where the work is hard and the outcome is real. The SASR had been better than expected. That assessment transmitted through the informal networks that carry the most direct professional knowledge within the special operations community shaped the planning for subsequent joint operations in ways that the formal doctrine had not yet caught up to.
The SASR did not seek the assessment. They had been doing the job they were sent to do.
