Securing the base: on 14 July 'hundreds' of insurgents attacked a temporary combat outpost in Afghanistan's Kunar province near the Pakistan border occupied by 45 members of the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team and 25 soldiers of the Afghan National Army. The attack inflicted the highest casually toll in more than three years, with nine US soldiers dead and another 15 wounded.

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Base protection

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Securing the base: on 14 July 'hundreds' of insurgents attacked a temporary combat outpost in Afghanistan's Kunar province near the Pakistan border occupied by 45 members of the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team and 25 soldiers of the Afghan National Army. The attack inflicted the highest casually toll in more than three years, with nine US soldiers dead and another 15 wounded.

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US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen said that defences at the outpost, which had been established only days earlier, had not been completed. The attack illustrates that insurgents in both Afghanistan and Iraq are adept at spotting weaknesses in force protection.

The vulnerability of military personnel to asymmetric attacks has been painfully demonstrated over recent years:

* on 23 October 1983 a suicide bomber crashed a truck into the headquarters of the US Marine Corps peacekeeping forces in Beirut killing 241 personnel and a simultaneous suicide attack against French peacekeepers killed 58

* on 25 June 1996 a truck packed with explosives was detonated on the edge of the Khobar military complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia killing 20 people, including 19 members of the US Air Force, wounding 372 others. Casualties would have been higher if but for a row of concrete highway dividers, commonly known as 'New Jersey barriers', which forced the terrorists to detonate the bomb 32 metres from the building

* on 21 December 2004 a suicide bomber dressed as an Iraqi soldier detonated an improvised explosive device in the...

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