






It also reflects the growing influence of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top coalition commander in Afghanistan, who has been able to persuade the military bureaucracy to adopt a series of far-reaching operational and organizational changes.

The new system is designed to address what Gen. McChrystal and his aides see as a major bureaucratic flaw: the military’s long-held belief that it could use Army and Marine units interchangeably in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. McChrystal has argued that Afghanistan was so complicated that the military needed to allocate specific units solely to that war.

He also made the case that the Pentagon should work to send those units back to the same parts of the country in which they had served before.

The troop withdrawal from Iraq has also made it easier for the military to implement the new program, since fewer forces are now required there.

“The idea is that you could then capitalize on the experiences and relationships they’d developed during earlier deployments by sending them back to a specific area,” said a military official in Kabul familiar with the deliberations.



In recent months, the Pentagon has created the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell, a fast-growing office charged with improving the military’s performance in Afghanistan; an “Afghan Hands” program, which is immersing dozens of officers from each of the military’s services in Afghanistan-related issues for the next three to five years; and a new intelligence center at the military’s Central Command designed to help troops better understand the country’s complex political dynamics.

On the ground in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies will soon create a new American-led military command in the south of the country to set the stage for a large-scale offensive later this year in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

The new Regional Command Southwest will be led by Marine Maj. Gen. Richard Mills, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, a military official said this week.

When Gen. Mills takes charge of the new command, the existing Regional Command South will be redirected to focus exclusively on the coming Kandahar campaign.

In another recent change, nearly all of the Special Operations forces in Afghanistan now report to Gen. McChrystal, whose predecessors lacked similar operational control over the Navy Seals, Army Delta Force commandos and other elite troops.

Military officials here and in Kabul said the Campaign Continuity system was originally going to apply only to the Army, with elements of the 82nd Airborne, 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain divisions cycling through eastern Afghanistan on a rotational basis.

But the officials said the plan had since been extended to the Marines, whose forces have primary responsibility for Helmand, Kandahar and the rest of volatile southern Afghanistan.