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Ping.

Colonel Tunnell is truly a courageous soldier. He placed his concerns about his troops ahead of his own career. Just wonder how many Navy commanders have the same concerns but have not written to the Secretary of the Navy. Our big blue water capital ships are in the narrow confines of the Persian Gulf and are very vulnerable to the Chinese shore to ship missiles that have been supplied to Iran. There is no strategic reason to put those big carriers in the Gulf.

Thanks for the ping. Will comment after work. There’s a lot of missing backstory here.

FYI—COL Tunnell was my Brigade Commander in Afghanistan while I was on Brigade staff.

1) Consider the source. Michael Yon has done some fine reporting in the past, there's no doubt. He had a special "in" with 5-2 due to his past relationship with CSM Prosser, our Brigade CSM. However, he's become unreliable in his information as of late. For example, he posted an article stating as fact the complete halting of all indirect fire and close air support in Afghanistan and no more patrolling aside from just outside the FOBs/COPs, when the reality was that this was a very temporary status. Temporary operational halts are common, and pretending like it was some permanent change that would cost lives was completely irresponsible. Yon should know better.

2) COL Tunnell was very nearly fired as the commander of 5-2 after the Brigade's NTC rotation just before their deployment. He was obsessed with implementing "counter-guerilla" as the Brigade's overarching strategy, focusing mostly on fire and maneuver at the expense of practically everything else. He was dismissive of COIN (counter-insurgency) as a strategy, as this letter clearly shows. While I won't go into the pros and cons of counter-guerilla and COIN, the idea that a BCT commander was going to shift all plans and operational resources of NATO in Regional Command-South (RC-S) to pursue his accepted doctrine from the 1970s was either completely idiotic or recklessly arrogant. Compound the issue with the fact that the commander of RC-S was a British one-star general who was practically a pacifist (remember the "courageous restraint" medal idea being floated around? That was his) and a tough operational environment was made even tougher due to the constant friction between Task Force Stryker and RC-S HQ.

3) Worst of all was 2-1 IN Battalion. While still in garrison, their Battalion Commander was fired essentially for driving his entire Battalion into the ground by working them relentlessly. COL Tunnell's "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" mentality was wholly embraced by that guy and he kept 2-1 training in the field constantly. With such a high deployment OPTEMPO, garrison, while important for training Soldiers, is also important for allowing some breathing room for Soldiers and their families. There was no breathing room in 2-1. They trained constantly and then they would deploy. Family time was minimal. He was the first Battalion Commander to sentence a Soldier to hard labor since Vietnam (I have to admit, I liked that one). Anyway, he was finally fired, but only after he was raising too many eyebrows from higher levels--COL Tunnell loved his aggression. Well, the aggression paid off with an aggressive unit.

However, there's a problem. From personal experience, aggression and COIN do not mix well. It's dull and frustrating. Very little actually happens when it comes to combat, especially in the Strykers since they're such a hard target. The enemy knows this and, aside from IED attacks, they tend to leave Strykers alone. This aggression and the idle hands led to rampant drug use and the formation of the infamous "Kill Team."

I know that some are loathe to bash a higher-up due to the terrible actions of low-level personnel whom he never even likely had contact with, but, especially in the Stryker Brigades, the joke goes that the chain of command is "God, the President, and the Brigade Commander." He fostered a certain climate, and it backfired considerably in the actions of some of his Soldiers. Added to the post-NTC misgivings about his command ability, it makes him look even worse.

4) This letter was written about a month after he changed command with COL Barry Huggins who was my Battalion Commander when I was in Iraq. COL Huggins is an outstanding officer and a generally brilliant guy. He was tasked with cleaning up the mess COL Tunnell left behind by implementing what amounted to a complete cultural shift of the newly re-flagged 2-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team (5-2 SBCT no longer exists, an action that was supposedly unrelated to past sins). This letter was little more than an attempt at justification for his command climate. The actions of 5-2 are why COL Tunnell was hit with a "smear campaign." He never should have remained in command of a combat brigade, yet he was kept on for P.C. reasons (not an official statement, but I'm absolutely convinced that's why he wasn't fired).