Courtesy of The Red, White and Blue, 2007

-COURTESY OF THE RED, WHITE, AND BLUE, 2007-

"We're not winning, we're not losing." - George W. Bush

Al-Qasr Governorate, Republic of Nahrain, and the Islamic Republic of Kashar

Combat Applications Group, A Squadron, with elements from Task Force White and Task Force Orange

Alternative Universe - 'Disillusioned Earth - Global War on Terror'

01 // THE WORLD — GWOT, 2007

The world that September 11th made is four years older and considerably more complicated than the people who planned the response to it anticipated. The United States is fighting two wars simultaneously — one in Kashar (Afghanistan equivalent) that has never resolved into anything clean, and one in Nahrain that has metastasized from a conventional military campaign into something that no doctrine written before 2003 fully describes. The domestic situation back home has the specific quality of a country that is spending faster than it is earning in every currency that matters — lives, money, political will, and the particular institutional confidence that comes from winning.

None of this is discussed at the operational level. At the operational level there is only the next target, the next package, the next window.

The Republic of Nahrain in 2007 is a country being consumed by two simultaneous insurgencies that share geography and occasionally share logistics but share nothing else ideologically.

The Sunni jihadist network operating under the Majlis Shura al-Mujahidin fi Nahrain, or for short, the MSMN, — is running a campaign of mass-casualty bombings, foreign fighter facilitation, and the kind of decentralized operational architecture that survives decapitation by generating new nodes faster than the task force can take them down.

The Shi'a militia network, called the Kata'ib al-Nahrain, the Nahraini Brigades, armed and directed by the Islamic Republic of Kashan's Badr Force — is running a parallel campaign of targeted assassinations, EFP attacks against American vehicles, and the institutional replacement of state functions in Shia districts that has made the militia the government in everything but name.

Task Force Green is the primary instrument against both networks. The campaign is running at a tempo t