Base headquarters group tapped to coordinate Taliban

By MARK WALKER – mlwalker@nctimes.com | Posted: Tuesday, December 8, 2009 8:25 pm

Two Camp Pendleton generals well versed in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq have been tapped to lead the Marine Corps’ role in the troop escalation in Afghanistan, Defense Department officials said Monday.

Maj. Gen. Richard Mills will command Camp Pendleton’s I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward in Afghanistan and have responsibility for all Marine forces there.

One of Mills’ deputies, Brig. Gen. Joseph Osterman, will serve as his battleground chief.

Mills has commanded the base’s 25,000-member 1st Marine Division for the last several months, and Osterman earlier this year was named to head a more than 4,000-troop Marine Expeditionary Brigade.

As the Marine Corps scrambles to add 9,000 of its troops to Afghanistan by March, that brigade has been redesignated as the I Marine Expeditionary Force Forward.

Joining Mills and Osterman are about 800 Camp Pendleton Marines who make up a headquarters group.

Mills is in Afghanistan preparing for the arrival of those troops.

The Pentagon said that about 1,500 Marines from North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune will make up the initial surge of leatherneck forces.

Those troops will operate under the umbrella of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment expected to arrive in Afghanistan around Christmas.

That group will be followed early next year by a 6,200-member regimental combat team that will include an unspecified number of troops from Camp Pendleton, base officials said.

Once all those troops have arrived, along with others who already had been slated for Afghanistan next year, the Marine Corps will have about 19,500 men and women in the south-central Asian nation.

The vast majority of the Marines will be stationed in the Helmand province, where the anti-government Taliban has re-established a stronghold in recent months.

Once there, military commanders said, troops will work to clear Taliban fighters from villages and the countryside and then stay in those areas to prevent their return.

Marine forces in Afghanistan launched just such an effort last week, partnering with Afghan forces to clear insurgent forces in a Helmand valley.

A Marine Corps statement issued Monday said that the operation yielded more than nine weapons caches of various sizes, and the combined force has found homemade explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars and several hundred components used to make roadside bombs.

Resistance by insurgent forces has been sporadic, the statement said.

The buildup was ordered by President Barack Obama last week and is intended to provide a sufficient number of troops to remain in the villages and countryside to keep the Taliban from returning.

By this time next year, the U.S. and its NATO allies will have about 148,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Camp Pendleton’s role in the fight will be its largest since base troops helped lead the invasion in the fall of 2001 following the 9/11 terror attacks.

After toppling the Taliban government in early 2002, a very small number of locally based troops were assigned to Afghanistan as the Marine Corps focused on the invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation of that country’s Anbar province.

It was there that Mills gained much of his counterinsurgency experience.

The New York native served as commander of Marine and U.S. Army ground forces in Anbar from October 2007 until January of this year.

Osterman served in Iraq from April 2005 to March 2006 as an adviser to the Iraqi army.

In June 2006, Osterman was named director of the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Warfare School.

He was named assistant commander of the 1st Marine Division and head of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Brigade in July.

As thousands of Camp Pendleton forces prepare for Afghanistan, the first wave of troops from the base’s 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment that has been in the Helmand province’s since the spring recently arrived home.

By Christmas, all of that unit’s approximately 1,200 troops are expected home from Helmand’s Nawa district.

Call staff writer Mark Walker at 760-740-3529.

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