Jim Gant

Jim Gant is a former United States Army Special Forces officer. He served for over 50 months in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and was wounded seven times. He was awarded a Silver Star for his actions in the Iraq War in 2007, and wrote an influential monograph on Afghanistan titled One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan. Following his last deployment in 2010–12, he was relieved of command and forced to retire after conducting an extramarital affair with reporter Ann Scott Tyson at his combat outpost in Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

Military career

Gant grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He enlisted in the Army after high school and because a Special Forces communications sergeant, participating in the Gulf War. He later became an officer and deployed as a captain to Afghanistan in 2003–4 and Iraq in 2006–7. Leading Operational Detachment Alpha 316, Gant conducted operations in Mangwal in Kunar Province and built strong relationships with the Mohmand tribe, especially the tribal chief, Malik Noor Afzal. On 11 December 2006, Gant's Special Forces team was attacked in a complex ambush on the road between Balad and Baghdad in Iraq. On 3 May 2007, Gant was awarded a Silver Star for valor for his actions during the 2006 ambush.

In 2009, he wrote an influential paper titled One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan. The paper argued that the United States should leverage the Pashtun tribal system in Afghanistan by creating "Tribal Engagement Teams" who would embed at the village level and work with locals to build security. General David Petraeus called the paper "very impressive," and General Stanley McChrystal distributed it to all commanders in Afghanistan.

Final deployment

In June 2010, Gant began a second Afghanistan deployment, returning to the village of Mangwal where he had served in 2003. In September 2010, a newspaper reporter, Ann Scott Tyson, took a leave of absence from the Washington Post and went to Kunar to live with him there for nine months, in violation of military regulations. Gant and his unit built relationships with the tribes by wearing traditional Afghan clothing instead of uniforms and learning Pashto. He remained in Kunar for 22 months and achieved significant operational success. General Petraueus called him "the perfect counterinsurgent" and compared him favorably to T. E. Lawrence, calling him "Lawrence of Afghanistan." By the middle of 2011, he had recruited 1,300 Afghan Local Police. At the same time, he engaged in unorthodox behavior such as ritually cutting himself and telling his soldiers that, "I believe in the wrathful God of combat. I believe in Hecate." He drank alcohol during the deployment, which is prohibited by Army regulations, and "self-medicated" with pain medication. In early 2012, Gant moved to the nearby village of Chowkay as part of an effort to win over the Safi tribe. There he came in contact with First Lieutenant Thomas Roberts, who reported to his chain of command that Gant was engaging in "immoral and illegal activities and actions." After the subsequent investigation he was relieved of command, demoted to the rank of captain, and given an official reprimand by Lieutenant General John Mulholland. He retired from the military soon afterwards. His actions led him to be compared to Colonel Kurtz from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. In 2014, Tyson wrote a book about Gant titled American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant.

Further reading

• Edwards, David (2020). "'The perfect counterinsurgent': reconsidering the case of Major Jim Gant". Small Wars & Insurgencies. 31 (2). Retrieved 2020-04-23.
• Gant, Jim (2009). "One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan" (PDF). Global Security. Retrieved 22 April 2020.