Wanat: It’s back

The new issue of Vanity Fair has a good overview piece by Mark “Black Hawk Down” Bowden about the Wanat battle and its effect on those who fought it, oversaw it and questioned it. Here’s a link to the article.

Meanwhile, Rand Corporation surfaces with a report on what Wanat might tell us about small unit operations in Afghanistan. I gave it a skim and can’t tell what, if anything, to make of it. I don’t want to keep on beating up on poor Rand, but I find their reports tend to be mushy. I read so much stuff that I want people to get to their essential points clearly, quickly and emphatically — as Col. Creighton Abrams did in an Army War College paper that I was reading yesterday in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. More on that later.