Horses remain an integral part of Afghan warfare
Are the rebels mad? Not according to Edwin Price Ramsey, generally considered the last man to lead a cavalry charge in U.S. history.
"The best vehicle they've got is a horse," said Ramsey, who led a mounted platoon against the Japanese in the Philippines in 1942.
If ever there was a mismatched blend of the modern and the medieval in warfare, it is in Afghanistan, where billion-dollar B-2s bomb old Taliban tanks, and mounted fighters of the Northern Alliance go at the gallop.
As vaguely described by Pentagon officials, rebels have been seen "riding horseback into combat against tanks and armored personnel carriers," their horses fed and watered with U.S. help.
Warriors have mounted horseback attacks ever since the ancient Scythians swept down from the high plains not far from Afghanistan more than 2,500 years ago. They were among the first to discover that a skilled rider on horseback could shock and panic mere foot soldiers.
Cavalry went into a period of decline after development of the long bow and spread of defensive pikes buried in the ground, in the mid-1300s.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, cavalry came back with the advent of weapons using gunpowder. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden trained his cavalry to advance at a gallop with the front rank firing.
Napoleon Bonaparte's French cavalry, coordinating with infantry and artillery, achieved rapid victories through Europe until Russians inflicted heavy damage on his horsemen in 1812.
Cavalry has given warfare some of its most gallant but gruesome moments, including the charge of the British Light Brigade, the 13th Hussars, against Russian guns at Balaclava in 1854. More than 650 cavalrymen attacked. Fourteen came back. Their deaths were memorialized in the famous 1864 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Against all logic, use of the cavalry persisted well into the 20th century. During World War I more than a million horses were deployed on European battlefields, mostly as transport.
In the most celebrated of the last cavalry charges, in 1939, Poland's Pomorske Cavalry Brigade, mounted on white horses and gripping sabers and lances in their white-gloved hands, rode gallantly into an oncoming German armored corps.
The Polish cavalrymen were slaughtered.
The last American horse charge was made by E Troop, 26th Cavalry Regiment, in the Philippines, where the U.S. cavalrymen actually routed advancing Japanese infantrymen — at least temporarily. Eventually, all U.S. forces in the Philippines were driven in retreat to the island of Corregidor, where they ultimately surrendered.
But not before eating the horses.
Sharif Ghalib, a counselor at the Afghan mission to the United Nations, where his country is represented by the anti-Taliban opposition, says an estimated 600 fighters, under the control of just one of the alliance commanders, Rashid Dostum, are on horseback.
Philip Smith, a Washington representative of Dostum, said the commander uses the horses in surprise flanking attacks on Taliban tanks, his men firing rocket-propelled grenades as they charge.
They ride horses simply because their tanks were captured by the Taliban in 1997, he said.
There is also the psychological advantage held by armed horsemen.
"You tower over the enemy. That's why police still use horses in cities," said Steven Draper, historian and curator of the 1st Cavalry Division Museum at Fort Hood, Texas.
"If you're standing on the ground as an infantryman and a guy's coming at you on a horse with a saber or lance or pistol, that's a pretty frightening thing," Draper said.
"Unless you're in a trench with a machine gun," he conceded. "Then it's not so frightening. A horse going up against a tank? That's a problem."
An expert on Afghan fighting tactics, however, says anyone who believes Northern Alliance rebels are charging straight into tank columns on horses has not been to Afghanistan.
"They don't fight on horseback, but the horse is vital for supplies and mobility," said David Isby, who wrote a book on weapons and strategy in the Soviet-Afghan war. "The horse is better than a four-wheel drive," though "I'm sure they would rather have lots of helicopters."
Fighting with mismatched weapons is itself an Afghan tradition.
In a parade marking the country's independence day Aug. 19, before the U.S. attacks started, a marcher carried a spear to symbolize the primitive weapons used to great effect against British guns in the 1800s.
Afghans also fought at a material disadvantage against modern Soviet weapons early in that war. On at least one occasion, they used horses to raid Russian border troops — themselves mounted, Isby said.
He said horses are the second-best way to get men and supplies to the front in mountainous terrain, next to helicopters. But neither he nor Ramsey thought a frontal cavalry assault on Taliban tanks or artillery was in the cards.
"You wouldn't charge a tank, that would be stupid," Ramsey, 84, said by phone from Los Angeles. But on certain ground, a mounted fighter can make trouble for a machine.
"We had a few people who crawled up the back of tanks in the middle of a fight and put grenades into them."
But the Northern Alliance horsemen actually might be on to something.
Take the American Plains Indians as a model — in Draper's view, probably the best light infantry the world has ever seen.
These Indians — Sioux, Apache, Commanche and Kiowa — were masters at circling enemy forces, striking at their rear lines of supply, mounting hit-and-run attacks on the enemy's flanks, and never standing still for a fair fight.
"If what they're doing is disrupting the Taliban's ability to communicate and resupply, then that's not bad," Draper said.
The U.S. Army still has cavalry, lots of it. Three full regiments, plus an entire division, the 1st Cav, at Fort Hood. There, they scoff at the notion of combat horses.
"We've got Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles," said Lt.Col. Paul Fisher, the division spokesman. Not to mention rocket artillery, attack helicopters, air-defense missile launchers, combat engineers and other stuff.
The 70-ton Abrams tears across country at more than 50 mph and, apart from its two machine guns, fires 50-pound 120mm shells a couple of miles.
No match for a horse.
Ramsey described the hurriedly organized charge by members of his 26th Cavalry platoon on Jan. 16, 1942 — 27 men firing pistols from their saddles in a headlong raid against an advance guard of Japanese infantry and artillery in the Bataan Peninsula village of Morong.
"We took the town after a fight and held it until the main body of our troops arrived," he said. In a hospital with a mortar wound, he learned the horses had been slaughtered for hungry soldiers.
Soon, the Philippines fell to Japan. U.S. soldiers surrendered there en masse and died by the thousands in the Bataan Death March; Ramsey escaped.
Patricia Bright, executive director of the U.S. Cavalry Association at Fort Riley, Kan., said the attack by Ramsey's 26th Cavalry platoon — or Philippine Scouts — brought an end to warfare on horseback by the American military. Even that was a rarity by the 1940s.
President Truman dissolved the last mounted units in 1950.
From Afghanistan, TV footage has shown alliance troops thundering into the distance on horseback, to destinations unknown.
"I see a bunch of Afghans running around on horses," Ramsey said. "If they were going against the Taliban, I would urge them on.
"There are those of us who believe we should have kept a little cavalry for ourselves."