Our good friend Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, who is the Director, US Army Public Affairs Midwest is deploying for Afghanistan on July 8th to serve under Major General John Campbell with the Combined Joint Taskforce – 101. Scott just forwarded this email from MG Campbell which provides great insight into their mission, successes and the challenges they face. Let’s keep all those who serve including their families and our veterans in our thoughts this independence day weekend – and every day.June 26, 2010
Greetings from Afghanistan! Trying to get an update out every few weeks to let you know how things are going…this is the first one for me on this deployment…last week (14 Jun), we began our current “Rendezvous with Destiny”. The Division Headquarters is now fully deployed, and has conducted a successful transition of authority with MG Scaparrotti and the 82nd Airborne Division. I am honored to assume responsibility of Regional Command – East in Afghanistan, and serve as Commander, Combined Joint Task Force – 101. This coming year is vital to the future of Afghanistan. Building upon past accomplishments, we will further Combined Action and Unified Action to help facilitate enduring Afghan solutions to Afghanistan’s challenges by, with and through our Afghan partners. For our success is measured by our partner’s success…and their success isn’t measured by the number of projects or missions we conduct, but by the faith and confidence the Afghan people entrust in them. I have been busy with battlefield circulation visiting our great service men and women along with several of our Afghan partners. I am impressed with all that they accomplish each day, and I am further impressed by the abilities and desire to grow capability that our Afghan partners have.
The entire Division remains extremely busy. 1st Brigade “Bastogne” completed their transition of authority on 1 June in the provinces of Nangahar, Nuristan, Kunar and Laghman (N2KL), and “Rakkasans” continue to make great strides in the provinces of Paktya, Paktika, and Khowst (P2K). Both 1st and 3rd Brigades deployed well trained and well prepared. They both understand their battle space from both a physical terrain and a human terrain perspective. They both face an extremely tough fight, but their preparation mitigates the severity of the fight in their area of operations. As we have surged our forces and must show demonstrable and clear progress over the next year, the enemy also has surged his forces. He is pushing hard to counter the success that we are having, and by so doing, he is making himself vulnerable. While we have seen a rise in casualties, so has the enemy. Our forces are doing a superb job of taking the fight to the enemy in order to secure the Afghan population. With a more secure environment we enable our civilian partners from the State Department, USAID, USDA, and others to further the development and governance capacity of local communities here. By increasing the capacity and capability of the local community, we strengthen the tie of GIRoA to the population, and further enable security. It is a positive cycle that will eventually lead to a stable Afghanistan.
4th Brigade “Currahees” completed their mission readiness exercise at the Joint Readiness Training Center, and will join us in Regional Command – East in August. We are busily preparing for their arrival by building new and expanding current COPs and FOBs. The 101st Sustainment Brigade “Lifeliners” have units deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and the headquarters will assume logistical command responsibility for Regional Commands – East, North, and Capitol in December. The 159th CAB “Thunder” has begun their training for their next deployment. They will replace Destiny early in 2011.
Sadly, as of this writing, we have lost twenty-three Screaming Eagle Fallen Heroes since “Rakkasans” deployed, and since we have taken over as CJTF-101, we have lost a total of fourteen Soldiers from CJTF-101. This includes our French and Polish partners, as well as, the 173rd Airborne, 86th IBCT (Vermont National Guard), and 3rd Combat Aviation Brigade out of 3rd ID. Anytime we lose a Soldier, including our Afghan partners, it impacts all of us. My deepest sympathies go out to the Families and communities who have lost their loved ones over the past few months. We owe them and their loved ones a debt we cannot repay, and I will never forget their sacrifice in defense of our Nation and for the people of Afghanistan. Every night I go down to the hospital along with Command Sergeant Major Schroeder, and we present Purple Hearts to our wounded. I carry cards in my pocket that have the photo and data of each of our Fallen Heroes. I keep them with me to both remind me of their sacrifice and to make sure I have done everything I possibly can to posture our forces for success across RC-East. That’s what keeps me up at night…have I and the CJTF staff done everything we can to set the conditions for the BCTs to accomplish the mission.
I have had some good “key leader engagements” (KLEs) since I have been here; not only with my Afghan counterparts in the Afghan National Army (ANA), the Afghan Uniformed Police (AUP) and the Afghan Border Police (ABP) but I was able to spend a day with the Acting President of Poland, his Minister of Defense, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs. We went out to visit Task Force White Eagle, his Polish Brigade that is part of CJTF-101. It was a great day of showing how our two countries are working together for the Afghan people…in addition to the Polish Brigade we have a French Brigade and Provincial Reconstruction Teams from Czech Republic, New Zealand and Turkey and we have a Korean team inbound now. In addition to the meeting with President Komoroski, I also had the opportunity to meet with several Ambassadors from the United Nations Security Council. Ambassador Rice, the US Ambassador, attended. Bastogne 6, COL Drew Poppas, along with his Senior Civilian presented a superb brief to the Ambassadors on the success their civil-military partnership is having on the Afghan population. My third such engagement was with several Afghan Parliament Members. We were able to show them the Detainment Facility here at Bagram, we had dinner with them, and we discussed several key issues that we are working to increase the capacity of the local government. The CJTF-101 hosted three superb events that left these key international leaders impressed and confident in the abilities of our coalition.
You can be proud of the work our great service members and our Afghan partners do here in Afghanistan. We have a very disciplined force, violent when it needs to be yet caring and compassionate as well. We have stressed that we will do everything "by, with and through" our Afghan partners; that starts at the very beginning in the planning stages of every operation through completion . The attached tri-fold is our campaign concept..you can see the lines of effort that our Soldiers will build upon; everything stems from protecting the population; and building the capacity of our Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF--Army, Police, Border Police) and this will help us get the local and provincial governments providing for the people…this is the most complex problem set I have seen but because of campaign continuity and our preparation and training that we conducted back at Ft Campbell…I am confident that we will make a difference…every day our Soldiers do make a difference in the lives of the Afghan people…you won’t see that all the time in the newspapers and the TV news but believe me it is happening all over RC-East. When President Karzai came to Ft Campbell right before we departed he thanked the Family members and the Soldiers for their sacrifice…for what they are doing for the people of Afghanistan, many Family members came up to me afterwards and said they never knew some of the things he explained (the number of kids in school, the number of females in their Parliament, the rise in the number of jobs, the different projects that had made a difference) and now they knew that their loved one was truly making a difference…I’ll try to pass along those good things to you in this “Eagle 6 Update” every few weeks…but I would encourage each of you to maintain visibility of our Screaming Eagles and Regional Command-East by visiting
www.cjtf101.com, the Fort Campbell Courier at
www.fortcampbellcourier.com,
www.ClarksvilleNow.com, or by visiting the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) Facebook page at
www.facebook.com/101st.
AIR ASSAULT--Eagle 6
JOHN F. CAMPBELL
MAJOR GENERAL, USA
COMMANDING GENERAL
CJTF-101/ REGION COMMAND-EAST
Back to News
