U.S. NAVY
Marines assigned to the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit approach the amphibious dock landing ship USS Carter Hall
after amphibious training in Djibouti Nov. 2. Carter Hall was part of the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group supporting
maritime security operations and theater security cooperation efforts in the U.S. Fifth Fleet area of responsibility.
“MEUs in the past had gone into Iraq and into
Afghanistan, but, usually, you kept a MEU as a cohesive unit,” Desens said. “This is the first time in the
history of the program where actually we took a chunk
of a MEU and it was taken away. A battalion landing
team was taken away from me and, since that was
where the hot fight was, I sent six MV-22s, four attack
helicopters and combat logistics battalion folks for
logistics — almost 1,350 people in Afghanistan.
“Where the enemy had sanctuary, we wanted to take
it away from them in the winter months so that, when
it came time for us putting a fence up, you didn’t have
any momentum,” he said. “So [BLT] 3/8 went in there
very quickly during the month of January [and] had
such a great effect shocking the enemy on their arrival
that they didn’t know what to do for the first month.
“While they were there, they built a road called the
6/11, which linked into the ring road [around the coun-try], Highway 1,” Desens said. “You need it for commerce
[and] to show that the government of Afghanistan could
do something. The Taliban knows that roads are bad for
their existence. Every single day, there was a logistics
vehicle hitting an IED [improvised explosive device].
“By the time they were done, the security environ-
ment they provided got the road almost completely
paved all the way north, and what wasn’t paved was
actually good road. So, now, you have 750 vehicles a
day traversing without getting IEDs because you had a
road and you have security. Bad for the Taliban, good
for us, good for the people of Afghanistan.”
With more than half of its Marines in Afghanistan,
the 26th MEU began reconstituting some of its capabil-
ities, but in response to threats from Hezbollah in
Lebanon and then the outbreak of “Arab Spring” — a
series of revolutions and unrest in several Arab nations
that began in Tunisia — Kearsarge and Ponce were
staged to the Red Sea while Carter Hall remained in the
northern Persian Gulf. Kearsarge and Ponce entered the
Mediterranean Sea in March as Libya erupted in civil
war and were preparing for noncombatant evacuation
when Operation Odyssey Dawn — the establishment
of a no-fly zone over Libya — began.
