armaments, boosted by the notoriety he gained from his ambush and helicopter shoot-down during Red Wings. Several weeks later, Shah's group was attacked in Kunar Province and disabled while Shah was later seriously wounded during Operation Whalers in August 2005. In April 2008, Shah was killed by Pakistani troops during a gunfight in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Origin of name When the 2/3 took the Operation Stars model and developed the specifics of it, 2/3's operations officer, Major Thomas Wood, instructed an assistant operations officer, 1st Lieutenant Lance Seiffert, to compose a list of hockey team names. 2/3 continued the use of hockey team names for large operations. Seiffert's list included ten teams, and the battalion settled on the fourth name on the list, "Red Wings", since the first three, New York Rangers, Chicago Blackhawks, and New Jersey Devils, each could be misconstrued as a reference to military units currently in Afghanistan at the time. The name has been widely mis-stated as "Operation Redwing" and sometimes "Operation Red Wing". This error began with the publication of the book Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10, which was written by Patrick Robinson based on interviews with Marcus Luttrell. 2/3 eventually abandoned this naming convention out of sensitivity to the local population, instead opting for using Dari names for animals, including "Pil" (elephant) and "Sorkh Khar" (red donkey). Background and development After the initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, U.S. military and coalition partner operations shifted from "kinetic" operations to those of a counterinsurgency nature. One of the primary goals of the coalition by 2004 in Afghanistan was nation-building, that is, providing a security environment conducive to the establishment and growth of a democratically elected government, as well as infrastructure support. A key milestone in this campaign was the September 18, 2005, Afghan national parliamentary elections. While many of Afghanistan's provinces at this time had stable security environments, one of the most restive continued to be the Kunar Province, which lies in eastern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan. For election results to be seen as legitimate by the citizens of Afghanistan and the world at large, all elections throughout the country would need to proceed "unencumbered" (without external influence, by either American and coalition forces or Taliban and anti-American and coalition forces), including those in Kunar. Insurgent activity in Kunar Province during