War, the military, COIN and stuff

The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army

 

The three and four star generals who have run the war in Iraq have received quite a bit of ink over the past several years, with General David Petraeus leading the pack in column inches dedicated to following his performance. He’s even had two books written about him, following his progress during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and during the Surge in 2007-2008. But the focus on him has come at the expense of a crop of other top generals who have also felt the pressure of leading American troops in combat—and reading The Fourth Star, the illuminating new book about the four generals who have led the fight in Iraq over the past six years, one is reminded of just how neglected these men have been.

The quick histories that have come out of the war thus far have largely painted George Casey as something of a Dostoevskian character, an uncreative, one-dimensional foil to the dash and artistry of Petraeus and his team, and while this book doesn’t flip that on its head—nor is Casey’s lack of creativity given a pardon—it does breathe some life into the rigid portrayal of Casey, a man whose leadership will likely be treated unkindly by history. But it must be said that Casey did “get” counterinsurgency, doing things like setting up a COIN academy at Taji to train incoming officers, among other initiatives. The problem is that the direction he received from Washington was at times confused, and the political infighting in the

West Wing

didn’t give him the political space to do anything but focus on training the Iraqi Security Forces, something he often did blindly and with too much emphasis on raw numbers at the expense of truly focusing on the population. By contrast, Petraeus, whose skills and political talent are undisputed, assumed command at a time when the White House finally took a decisive stand on the direction of the war. Also, by 2007 the Sunnis were already successfully fighting al Qaeda in Anbar province; many of the militias in Baghdad had essentially fought themselves into exhaustion; and Baghdad neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed to a significant degree. Easy, hagiographic Surge narratives often gloss over these salient facts, and future historians must be careful not to ignore the social landscape Petraeus inherited.

The book expands its focus from these two men—who unfortunately have already begun to descend into caricature in the popular imagination—to include two other pivotal characters, generals Peter Chiarelli and John Abizaid, men who also played a critical role in the war in Iraq. Chiarelli and Abizaid are as complex as any other character in the Iraq saga, and despite their long and distinguished careers, will be invariably be lumped in to the Pre-Surge era of failure in Iraq. Neither can be excused for the failures of judgment, but Jaffe and Cloud do the men a service in giving us a more complete picture of their careers from young officers to the most powerful field commanders in the U.S. Army. Chiarelli in particular—who is currently Vice Chief of Staff of the Army—emerges as something of a tragic figure who agonizes over the failures of his beloved Army to make any significant progress in Iraq, despite his zeal in tackling public works projects that fail repeatedly. He was also bitterly disappointed not to be given command in Iraq in 2007, after leading the 1^st Calvary Division in Baghdad, then commanding Multi-National Corps-Iraq, before being sent back to the Pentagon in favor of Petraeus and Gen. Ray Odierno.

Significantly, all four of these men shared the struggle of taking the “broken” Army of the 1970s and rebuilding it into the unparalleled fighting force it is today. The book is a welcome contribution to the literature of the war, and is an eminently readable long-form character sketch—broken up among four protagonists—that traces the history of the post-Vietnam U.S. Army as well as any other book of recent vintage.

The most illuminating aspect of the book is the look inside “Sosh,” the Social Sciences Department at the West Point Military Academy. The department played a critical and often overlooked role in the formation of Army culture following Vietnam, fostering unfettered debate about the war and the Army’s way forward following the American pullout. But there are also dangers for officers who wish to move back into combat arms after a sojourn in the department. Chiarelli and Petraeus both had an extraordinarily hard time moving back into the ranks after their time in Sosh, because in taking an intellectual retreat, they failed to punch their infantry commander tickets, something that is still the mark of a leader in the service. The book does just as much to explain the politics of moving up in today’s Army as it gives us some much-needed perspective of the culture that fostered the leadership that oversaw the darkest days of the war in Iraq.

More Afghan Combat Soldiers, But at What Cost?

As part of my conversation with Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, who heads up the ISAF training programs, I had the opportunity to also talk to U.K. Brigadier Simon Levey, the Commanding General for the Combined Training Advisory Group in Kabul, and learned a little more about the logistics issues plaguing the Afghan armed forces, and efforts aimed at promoting literacy among the ANA.

Echoing Gen Formica, Levey says that standing up Afghan logistics battalions is still years away, and the CSTC and ISAF are throwing all of their weight behind getting as many Afghasn combat soldiers out in the field as possible. “We’re going to delay those a year or two so we can apply that force structure to infantry-centered force,” he said, “we’re going to take every Kandak in the South and the East and we’re going to add a fourth company to each of those forty-four Kandaks…to give them more infantry soldiers faster.” In other words logistics and supply operations will be handled by ISAF for the forseeable future. “We’re also going to add 7,500 soldiers to Kandaks in the South and the East without adding structure,” he explained “just additional soldiers to increase the readiness of the unit.”

But while ISAF is focusing on infantrymen, it is also developing the branch schools for combat arms, artillery, signals and engineering, which I discovered firsthand when spending time with a French trainign team in Kabul. The intelligence school in Kabul—which is being run by the Americans and the French—is currently training both army and police forces, and Levey is proud of the fact that the school recently graduated nineteen police women who went through a five-day intelligence training course. About five of those policewomen are slated to come back to the school to be put though the entire intelligence analyst program.

Another big push is the need to increase the literacy rate for troops and police officers in a country in which only about 28 percent of the people can read and write. Gen Formica has brought in Dr. Mike Faughnan as his literacy and language division chief, and Faughnan pegs the literacy rate in the Afghan officer corps at about 93 percent, whereas he estimates that about 30 percent of NCOs can read and write, and a paltry 11 percent of the enlisted soldiers are literate. Faughnan says that literacy training is currently available in basic training, and is also being pushed aby the Religious and Cultural Affairs officer in each Kandak. “We’re working on making it a mandatory program, because it hasn’t been in the past,” he says.

How Many Troops Are Available for Possible Afghan Surge?

As the White House and the Pentagon knock around different scenerios for the way forward in Afghanistan, and pundits wring their hands over how long it is taking president Obama to make a decision on troop strength, the elephant in the room is whether or not we have the troops to pull off sending up to 40,000 more troops to the fight. The issue of dwell time between deployments is a critical factor here, since many units have deployed two, three, or four times  to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past seven years. Ackerman writes: 

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

Digging deeper, he unearths this sobering reality:

An additional five brigades will finish their 12 months of so-called “dwell time” at home between deployments by April 2010, providing an additional 22,600 troops, but by that time, about 10,200 troops will be scheduled to leave Afghanistan, leaving available a net gain of 12,400. More brigades become available in the summer and fall, although others currently in Afghanistan will be ending their scheduled deployments then as well. Under current Pentagon policy, dwell time for the National Guard varies, but can be no shorter than two years, and so it is possible but not certain that two National Guard brigades composed of 6,800 National Guard soldiers might be available for deployment by March 2010 as well, beyond the 24,000 theoretically available now. Pentagon leaders had hoped to extend dwell time this year, but that was before McChrystal’s request for additional troops.

The entire piece is well worth your time.

Embedded in Afghanistan

ANA Cpt. Gada Mohamad and First Sgt. Tim Burd, Camp Wilderness, Afghanistan. (Photo: Paul McLeary)

While in Afghanistan in September, I spent some time with an Embedded Training Team from A Company of the 1^st Battalion, 121^st Regiment, 48^th Brigade Combat Team, part of the Georgia National Guard, to observe the training and mentoring of the Afghan Army at the operational level out in the field.

My longer-form piece about the embed is out in the November issue of DTI, and it features some interviews with Afghan Army officers, a perspective that is missing from too much of our domestic debate about the war. This is an Afghan war—I would even say an Afghan civil war—and it has to be fought by Afghans. In order for the NATO alliance to have a reasoned and well-informed debate about the way forward in Afghanistan, we first have to understand what the Afghans want, and to do that we have to listen to them, as opposed to arguing among ourselves at think tank conferences in the comfortable capital cities of the West. I’m not nearly self-involved enough to think that this piece answers those questions—far from it—but it can serve as a look into the hard work American and Afghan troops are doing on the ground. The whole piece is available here, and here’s a snippet:

Sitting in his room at Camp Wilderness, a small outpost shared by soldiers from the U.S. Army and Afghan National Army (ANA) tucked away in Afghanistan's mountainous Khost province, Capt. Gada Mohamad of the ANA's 2/1 Kandak (battalion), talked about what his troops bring to the fight against the Taliban. "We know how to act with the people," he says. "The Afghan people are uneducated. We can explain to them that we're here for their security. Most importantly, we can read the people" in ways the Americans cannot.

Mohamad takes the pragmatic approach of a man who is ready to fight, but recognizes that fighting isn't always necessary. "If we get hit from a village," he continues, "we won't attack the village; our enemy is the Taliban. We will set a perimeter of security and apologize to the villagers, telling them this is our job, and we're trying to protect the people."

As part of the effort to train and increase the size of the ANA, Mohamad's unit is mentored by Alpha Co. of the 1st Btn., 121st Infantry Regt., 48th Brig. of the Georgia National Guard, which has been hammering away at lessons like this for months. The ANA is resourced pretty thin, fielding 87,000 soldiers, with plans to increase to 134,000 in the near term.

Reaching out to the population, Mohamad says, includes explaining to them that the Taliban is funded by Pakistan, and "Pakistan doesn't like Afghanistan. They don't want the Afghans to be educated, to be on the same level as them."

The rest is here.

The Afghan Army's Logistics Problem

Afghan Army prepares for a mission. (Photo: Paul McLeary)

When people talk about the problems besetting the Afghan National Army, three issues usually jump to the head of the pack: the difficulties the ANA has in supplying its soldiers in the field with food, clothing, ammunition, and shelter; the issue of corruption at all levels from the ministerial to the grunts on the ground; and third, the ability—or the willingness—of the ANA to fight.   

The first two issues were the topic of a conversation I had last month with Major General Richard Formica, commanding general of the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A), the organization tasked with training the Afghan army and police. Formica had no qualms about discussing the areas in which the Afghans lack capacity, and described a force that is rapidly increasing in size and fighting effectiveness, (when it fights), but is still years away from being able to stand on its own.

Most troublesome for the ability of the ANA to operate independently of NATO forces is the issue of logistics. At its core, logistics is a function of not planning, Formica said, and when it comes to Afghan forces, “typically at most levels they don’t plan well, they’re more spontaneous.” While the ANA has a system for resupply in place, Formica says that “we want to force that system to work. We’ve asked the mentors along the chain to work with them at each level to try to force it to work. The reality on the ground is when you get ready to go do an op, if they don’t have it and we can give it to them we give it to them so we can go do the op. But it would be a lot worse to just sit on the FOB and not do ops.”

This is something I heard from the American mentors on the ground during my embed in September, and they weren’t happy about it. The ANA regularly will not think through what they might need—water, ammunition, etc.—for a long mission, because they know their American mentors will simply give it to them if they need it. After several months of this, the Embedded Training Team for the 2/1 Kandak in Khost decided to practice some tough love, and if the Afghans don’t bring enough water, they would simply refuse to give them theirs, trying and hammer home the lesson that planning for a mission is just as important as leaving the gate and executing it. The Team had some success with the method, and after a while the ANA started to bring their own supplies on missions. Still, their overall planning for missions was lackluster, but with the 2/1 Kandak at least, it was slowly getting better.

Part of the problem stems from the fact that the ANA has yet to stand up its own logistics and resupply units, as a result of the rush to train and field combat troops. Gen. Formica says that “In their defense, it’s only been the last couple of years that we started fielding Afghan [Combat Service Support] Kandaks in the brigade, and that was a deliberate decision made to field the infantry guys first. So now they’ve got CSS Kandaks in the brigades, and we’re trying to make that work.” As of right now, Formica continued, there is only one Afghan combat support battalion at the Corps level “and we’re going to delay the others until the next year and the year after that because the current emphasis is to get more infantry soldiers on the ground now.”

In other words, while NATO stands up Afghan fighting units, the coalition will continue to be responsible for making sure their food, clothing, and ammunition are provided to them. 

New IED Task Force Working With JIEDDO

Homemade explosives found by US forces in Iraq. (Photo: Paul McLeary)

Late last week, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates added a new wrinkle to the Pentagon’s efforts to combat the IED threat in Afghanistan by announcing that he was launching a new IED task force to be led by Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter and Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Paxton, the Joint Staff’s director for operations J-3.

The announcement raised a few eyebrows, since over the past several years the Pentagon has pumped about $16 billion into the Joint IED Defeat Organization (JIEDDO), which evaluates what technologies and techniques work best to mitigate the IED threat. While JIEDDO is meant to be a clearinghouse of sorts for all counter-IED brainstorming and technology within the DoD, the “joint” in its name doesn’t always accurately reflect reality. The organization has virtually no institutional power, and the services are loathe to share their own counter-IED programs with it, something Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, director of JIEDDO, admitted before the House Armed Services Committee two weeks ago, when he reported that no central database on anti-IED efforts currently exists within the DoD. When I caught up with Gen. Metz after the hearing he told me that JIEDDO is “working on a database that has all of our efforts so that I can very quickly tell someone what did or did not work, and a log of all of the activity.” But, he said, he is “not aware of any database that’s got all of the services’ efforts” collected in one place.

This is a problem, and a big one. Gates said last week that that he wants the new task force “to break down the stove pipes” that keep the various counter-IED groups sprinkled throughout the military from working together. “We have people working all these different pieces,” he told reporters. “My concern is whether all this has been properly integrated and prioritized and aligned, and whether we are adaptable and agile enough.”

This, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told me on Friday, is exactly what the new task force is designed to do. With the institutional muscle that the task force is being given it is hoped that it will be able to get the services to begin working together rather than working the problem separately. But is this new task force a vote of “no confidence” in JIEDDO? Morrell said no way, adding that Gates “had a very tight meeting with some of the principles involved, where he announced this…he was meeting with the ISR Task Force, the MRAP Task Force, JIEDDO, intelligence officials, with CENTCOM, and with ISAF,” to hatch his plan. “This is more than a JIEDDO problem,” he continued, “if it’s just the bombs themselves, that’s one thing, if it’s just the vehicle protection itself, that’s one thing, if it’s just the intelligence, that’s another thing. [Gates] wants to make sure that all of these efforts are integrated and collaborating, and that’s what this is about. It’s not a shot at any one of those organizations, but he thinks that we’re now confronting a situation in Afghanistan where we have to make sure we are all pulling in the same direction in order to get ahead of these guys.”

Morrell also cautioned not to read too much into the fact that JIEDDO isn’t one of the chairs of the new task force, saying that “the ISR and MRAP task forces will also have a seat at the table,” and that while JIEDDO is good at forensics and spinning out technologies, this new working group is expanding its study to look at things like the Soviet experience with roadside bombs in Afghanistan—things JIEDDO hasn’t been tasked with. This is all well and good, but the fact remains that JIEDDO appears to be struggling for interagency respect and clout, and this new task force will hopefully compel the services to truly being operating in a joint manner. The stakes are too high.

Combating the X Threat

 

The U.S. Army has developed an advanced new generation of protective ballistic plates for its soldiers to combat what it calls the “X Threat,” and according to senior Army officials, the plates are waiting in the wings in case they’re needed.

The “XSAPI” plates, as opposed to the Enhanced Small Arms Protective Insert (ESAPI) plates currently being used by the American armed forces, have been designed to meet what is commonly considered to be a higher-velocity threat than the current 7.62 rounds commonly used by insurgents. The Army’s product manager for Soldier Protective Equipment Lt. Col. Jon Rickey says that while that threat hasn’t yet fully emerged on the battlefield, delivery of the plates began late this year, and “we are in the middle of doing lot acceptance testing…in case we see that threat emerge in theater.” Rickey declined to comment on what the “X-threat” is, only saying that the Army is trying to get ahead of “what we believe will appear.” The plates are made out of the same type of materials as the ESAPI plates currently in use, he said—silicon carbide, ceramics and poly ethylene and Kevlar—“its just how you put it together that provides the additional capability.” The XSAPI plates would add almost an extra pound to the load currently carried by soldiers, which has also given the service pause in making them standard issue.

A Government Accountability Office report issued last month focused on what it said were flaws in the testing of the new plates, but Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, chief of PEO Soldier, told reporters in a conference call that the Army is still in the testing phase, and “we are interested in taking all this data, the Phase II testing, Phase III testing, the additional surveillance testing -- wrap it all up in one report and provide it back to the Hill.” Even with these new, sturdier yet heavier plates, Lt. Col. Rickey said there is still a lot of innovation left to be tapped in the ballistic protection field. “We’ve only tapped into about forty percent of where the industry can go in terms of poly ethylene. In the world of aramid fibers they’re continuing to look at ways they can improve the resins and unidirectional weaves to give them more capability at a light weight.”

Afghan Audio

A couple of my colleagues at DTI / Aviation Week do a once a week podcast called "Check Six" where they talk about missiles, space and military aviation--things I know absolutely nothing about. But last week they were kind enough to bring me in to talk a bit about my trip to Afghanistan. You can listen to it here.

The Cost of the DoD's Fuel Addiction

A new study looking at the U.S. military’s dependence on fossil fuels lays out some jarring numbers concerning the amount of fuel being burned, and the cost of transporting it to combat zones. Tracking the U.S. military’s energy use in conflicts from WWII to the current fights in Iraq and Afghanistan, consultant Deloitte LLP found that there has been a whopping 175 percent increase in gallons of fuel consumed per soldier per day just since the Vietnam war.

The report’s authors found that in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate of fuel consumption when pegged to the number of soldiers in theater adds up to 22 gallons used per soldier, per day—and the burn is only going to go up in the future, with an expected annual growth rate of 1.5 percent through 2017.

This isn’t to say that the Pentagon hasn’t made moves to make some of its trucks, ships and aircraft more fuel efficient—they certainly have. The Pentagon has even announced plans to use $300 million of the $7.4 billion it received from the economic stimulus package to speed up a host of existing programs aimed at developing alternative fuels and saving energy, and work is being done at various levels on hybrid vehicle engines that will reduce the fuel consumption needs of deployed forces. But none of this is enough at least in the short term, according to the Deloitte study. “These significant improvements in efficiency are vastly overshadowed by the higher number of vehicles and increasing rate of use,” the report says, adding that the use of convoys to carry the fuel to forward operating bases is itself problematic, since IEDs and various logistical problems add to the cost, both in lives and money.

In 2008, the DoD reported that it lost forty-four fuel trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel to accidents, IEDs, pilferage, and weather. The cost of this wastage hits home when you add up how much a single gallon of fuel costs to ship to a far-flung combat zone. While the military normally pays about $2 to $3 for a gallon of fuel, “protecting fuel convoys from the ground and air costs the DoD upward of 15 times the actual purchase cost of fuel, depending on the level of protection required,” which in some cases raises to total cost to almost $45 per gallon once it is finally delivered.

Since upward of 70 percent of the tonnage required to put the U.S. Army on the battlefield today is fuel, keeping the roads open to drive this fuel to forward operating bases is critical—and the enemy knows it. Between July 2003 and May 2009, 43 percent of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq were caused by IEDs, and the number is 38 percent in Afghanistan from 2005 through 2009. because of this, the report drops its most alarming prediction: “absent game-changing shifts, the current Afghan conflict may result in a 124% (17.5% annually) increase in U.S. casualties through 2014, should the war be prosecuted with a similar profile to Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

In order to try and prove that prediction wrong, the report states that the use of alternative energy “may rank on par with the business cases for the development of ever more effective offensive weapons, sophisticated fuel transport tankers, mine resistant armored vehicles, and net centric sensing technologies,” as a national security concern.

Pentagon Actually Learning Lessons?

Sustainment contracts for the Pentagon’s fleet of tactical wheeled vehicles probably isn't the sexiest topic out there, but when it comes to the brand-new M-ATVs currently making their way to the Afghanistan theater, they're worth talking about.

The contracts being awarded to M-ATV manufacturer Oshkosh reflect some critical lessons learned in the Pentagon’s rush to ship 16,000 MRAPs to Iraq and Afghanistan. After spending $26 billion on various MRAP contracts—a number that doesn’t include sustainment and repair bills—the Pentagon is getting of jump on future sustainment contracts when the M-ATVs need repairs.

The MRAP repair and upgrade contracts are a huge—and escalating—cost that hasn’t received a lot of attention. Navistar recently received a contract totaling $78 million to be paid over the next four years for new hardware and vehicle enhancements on its fleet of MaxxPro MRAPs. Earlier this year, ManTech International Corp. was awarded a contract for $355 million for “rapid repair requirements for the Army's fleet of RG31 and RG33 MRAPs,” and a quick search turns up more than $100 million spent on sustainment on the RG-31 MRAP alone over the past several years. On top of this, Oshkosh has received $190 million in contracts to replace the suspension systems on 2,500 Cougar and RG-33 MRAPs already in Afghanistan with their more durable TAK-4 independent suspension system.

While these somewhat buried costs are cumbersome, continuous, and ad hoc, the Department of Defense decided to go a different route with the $2.7 billion M-ATV contract with Oshkosh. According to R. Andy Hove, President of Oshkosh Defense, sustainment costs were included in the original contract, and the company is busily working to field both the vehicle and the extra parts kits and trainers that are being shipped along with them. The company has already received a $16 million contract for spare parts as well as a $12 million order for field service representative support in Afghanistan. “We’re providing both rollover trainers and drivers trainers,” Hove says, adding that the rollover trainers have already been deployed in theater. “That was one of the lessons learned from the original MRAP program,” he tells ARES, adding that “much closer attention was paid to spare parts availability and training prior to deployment” than had been with previous vehicle contracts.

Oshkosh is also sending about twenty repair and replacement kits a month to Afghanistan along with the 1,000 M-ATVs it ships, Hove says, adding that each kit has over 150 parts “that range from everything from the front hood to engine hoses.” But don't let the  description of the replacement packages as “kits” mislead you--it “takes three semi truck loads to transport” ach kit Hove says. Once the teams on the ground start going through those initial spares, the demand history for each part will be recorded, since the parts are encoded with National Stock Numbers so that every service can order their M-ATV spares through their own logistics system. Hove said that they’re doing this so the services won’t have to “stand up an ad hoc system that doesn’t fit into the overall DoD logistics system.” All this doesn’t mean that repair costs will necessarily be less than they have been in the past, but the process will at least be more orderly, and easier to track, than previous rush orders.

Training Program for Afghan Army Changed

(Crossposted at ARES)

The years-long mentoring program that paired American Embedded Training Teams (ETT) with Afghan National Army units came to an end last month with little fanfare, even though it marked a major change in the way the United States and its allies are trying to stand up the Afghan armed forces.

For several years, the ETT mission paired small groups of a dozen or so American soldiers and Marines with larger Afghan units, mentoring them on everything from weapon discipline to mission planning and logistical tasks in the field. This has changed to what Major General Richard Formica, commanding general of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) calls the “two-brigade concept” that places more emphasis on partnering and less on mentoring, with the 48^thth Brigade of the 82^nd Airborne Division focusing their efforts exclusively on the mission. Brigade Combat Team from the Georgia National Guard and the 4

“There will be the expectation that the embedded partner will not only do the partner tasks, but they will also do the very specific mentor tasks that an ETT does,” Gen. Formica told ARES. But even this is slated to change. The CSTC, which until recently oversaw all of the training of the Afghan National Security Forces, has handed off the partnering and mentoring duties at the Corps level and below to the newly created ISAF Joint Command office, headed by Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, who has assumed control of day-to-day tactical operations in Afghanistan.

Under this new structure, for the first time regional commanders will assume responsibility for the partnership and training mission in their area of operation, Gen. Formica says, and “not only will they have the assets of these two brigades available to them, but the role of the brigades working for the regional commands are going to be expected to do embedded partnering” exclusively, leaving the commander’s other units free to wage the counterinsurgency fight.

But the CSTC isn’t going away. Instead of controlling the training and fielding of the Afghan armed forces, Formica says that the CSTC will now focus on “generating the force.” This includes working with the Afghan ministries of Defense and the Interior, as well as national-level logistics, Afghan Air Corps, and providing “institutional training” like basic training, officer and NCO development, police training, running the military academies, and working to generate new soldiers and new units. “This is a complex command,” Formica says, “we operate at the ministerial and institutional level all the way down to the Kandak level, and while this will still be a complex command, we’ll let the regional commanders train Corps level and below and I think that will make a better fit.”

What does this look like on the ground? Former ETT leader Sergeant First Class Tim Burd of the 48^th Brigade of the Georgia National Guard emails to say that he’s happy that his unit will “become battlespace owners” while working with the ANA in their area. “The good side is that I will have my Platoon back working with me and not just the 14 [soldiers] on the ETT mission. The down side is we are moving to a new location,” away from the Afghan troops he and his men have lived with for months, to partner with a company-sized element of the Afghan army.

It’s a big change in the way ISAF is working to stand up the Afghan Armed Forces, and one that depends largely on the ability and the willingness of the regional commanders to resource and support the partnering mission with as much care as they give to the units already under their command.

UAVs vs.Ground Pounders

While the “civilian surge” of governmentand humanitarian workers promised for the fight in Afghanistan has been slow to materialize, the Dept. of Defense is working on a more tech-oriented surge that should start to pay dividends some time next year.

As it stands now, the U.S. Army is fielding about 1,400 RQ-11 Raven UAVs in the field, using the small, four pound platform to conduct surveillance at the tactical level. As of right now, the raven uses an analog link to communicate back to the ground, but come December, the Army plans to start fielding Ravens that have digital data link capabilities. This means that up to sixteen Ravens will be able to share a single frequency, as opposed to only four, as is currently the case with analog. The Army Times reports that by the end of this year, “the first of more than 780 Ravens will be put to use, likely benefiting the current push in Afghanistan. In addition, the existing 1,400 in the field will be retrofitted with the digital benefit. Retrofitting could be complete as early as 2012, and all new Ravens should be fielded by 2015.”

At the same time, the much larger and more sophisticated MQ-9 Predator UAV is about to receive an upgrade to its surveillance capabilities, being outfitted with a new, more powerful sensor called the “Gorgon Stare,” previously known as “Wide-Area Airborne Surveillance,” which will be capable of filming an area up to a 1.5 mile radius during both day and night operations from twelve different angles. In 2011, that area is slated to increase to three miles, and the number of angles visible will jump to sixty-five.

These new and improved capabilities are not only going to have an effect on the battlefield, but they’re directly influencing the political battles back in Washington over how the war in Afghanistan should be conducted. The Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes quotes an anonymous defense official who is drawing some hasty and not clearly defined lessons from the use of airborne ISR assets, claiming that “The technology allows us to project power without vulnerability…You don't have to deploy as many people. And in the modern age you want as little stuff forward as long as you can achieve the effects as if you had lots of people forward.”

This is actually some pretty shocking stuff. The strategy of the Obama administration (as much as we know what that is), and of ISAF chief Gen. Stanley McChrystal (who has made his views very clear) is to wage a population-centric counterinsurgency mission to achieve a counterterrorism goal. And you can’t accomplish that mission by pulling troops out of Afghanistan while thinking you can replace them with more ISR assets in the air. Doing that changes the game to a straight counterterrorism mission aimed at whacking as many Taliban and al Qaeda leaders as your sensors can track.

There are obviously some serious disagreements in Washington over how to go about fighting the war in Afghanistan—sending in more troops to train the Afghan security forces and perform “clear, hold and build” operations, or pulling them out and launching Special Forces and air strikes against targets—but when discussing these options, let’s not start thinking that technology can do more than its current abilities and numbers allow. Eyes in the sky don’t replace boots on the ground. They augment the capabilities and the situational awareness of the ground pounder, but they don’t replace him—especially if you’re involved in a counterinsurgency fight.

Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan Pt. II

A member of TF ODIN-Afghanistan signs a Hellfire missile attached to a Warrior UAV at Begram. (Photo: US Army)

The November issue of DTI has more from my September embed with Task Force ODIN-Afganistan. The issue also features the write-up of my embed with the 48th BCT of the Georgia National Guard in Khost. As far as the ODIN story goes, you can read the whole thing here.

The camera didn’t catch the helicopters landing, or see the soldiers piling out and securing the landing zone. The unblinking eye attached to a U.S. Army Warrior Alpha unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) circling thousands of feet above the Afghan countryside was too busy keeping watch over the high mud walls of a compound the soldiers were preparing to assault.

The soldiers only began to appear as tiny black smudges in the real-time images that flashed back to the ground control station when they converged on the compound. It was at this point that 22-year-old Army Pfc. Joshua Carter and a civilian contractor monitoring the action miles away at Bagram Air Base, charged with guiding the UAV and manipulating its camera, heard the first static-filled instruction from the commander on the ground: “Sparkle the corner of the northeast wall.” Carter grabbed the joystick on his console and pressed the button to laser the corner so it would show up in the team’s night-vision sights. “Good sparkle,” crackled the reply.

You can read the rest of the story here

No Central Pentagon IED Database, Bomb Chief Says

If you’re looking for a database that collects and tracks all of the Pentagon’s counter-IED programs, don’t look to the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) to provide it. While the Pentagon’s four year-old attempt to get “left of the boom” on the roadside bombs that have plagued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is tracking its own programs, it is not following those the other services are funding and fielding, leading to a duplication of efforts and a failure to centralize information.

That’s the conclusion a harsh new Government Accountability Office report came to when it looked into JIEDDO’s operations. The report says that JIEDDO and the service branches have failed to share information in any meaningful way about IED attacks, citing the “lack a comprehensive database of all existing counter-IED initiatives, limiting their visibility over counter-IED efforts across DOD.” The GAO says that while the counter bomb outfit is currently working on a new management system, it will only track JIEDDO-funded initiatives and “not those being independently developed and procured by the services and other DOD components.” With such “limited visibility, both JIEDDO and the services are at risk of duplicating efforts.”

This was a big issue an often contentious House Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill yesterday, where Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, director of JIEDDO, told the committee that “I agree that we lack a comprehensive effort” to guard against duplication of efforts among the services, but assured them he was working on it. “There will be some natural friction” between the services and JIEDDO Metz said, when it comes to the battle for funding to get out in front of the problem.

The most strident pushback came from Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Ca), who expressed frustration with the government’s inability to defeat the IED threat. Hunter charged that “there is no correlation” between the money spent on counter-IED efforts, the number of ISR assets in theater, and the number of American deaths. He said he didn’t see why the threat can’t be managed better, telling Metz point-blank that “the buck has to stop with you because we don't have anybody else…There is no other IED defeat organization in Washington or anywhere else in the U.S. government ... whose sole mission is to stop IEDs.”

Also testifying at the hearing was William Solis from the GAO, who commented that “it’s going to take a Department effort” to address all of these problems, adding that “until these issues are dealt with its going to be very difficult for the organization to continue…to understand all the different solutions out there, what all of the different organizations are working on, is critical.”

I caught up with Gen. Metz after the hearing and asked him about the lack of a central database to track IED programs. He said that JIEDDO is “working on a database that has all of our efforts so that I can very quickly tell someone what did or did not work, and a log of all of the activity,” but that he is “not aware of any database that’s got all of the services’ efforts” collected in one place.

To be fair, we can’t dump all of this on JIEDDO. There is only so much the outfit can be expected to accomplish when its funding stream isn’t even in the base budget from year to year, its budget has been shrinking over the last several years, and it has been given no real authority to get the other service branches to share information. (Still, Metz’s office has been given $16 billion to play with over the past four years.) With each service branch jealously guarding its own turf, and more importantly, its own funding streams, there’s nothing Gen. Metz can do to compel the services to share information with him.

Afghanistan is a Test for NATO Says Former CENTCOM Chief

Speaking at the annual meeting of the International Peace Operations Association, a governing body for private military contractors earlier this week, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of CENTCOM and current chairman of BAE Systems Inc. said that he doesn’t think that the case for the war in Afghanistan has properly been made to the American people. “I’m still waiting for the fireside chat,” he said, adding that the case has to be made not only to the American people, but to NATO allies, as well.

“This can’t be America’s war, this has to be internationalized,” he continued, adding that the fight in Afghanistan “ought to be a question of defining NATO,” and what kind of security organization it is, if some NATO allies will deploy their troops but not allow them to engage in combat. “If they don’t want to fight then we might have to look at what other alliances make sense” in order to provide a true military alliance.

Zinni also touched on the difficult issue of civilian agencies and private groups doing reconstruction work in a combat zone, without adequate security to back them up. “If you don’t secure the area, you can’t do anything else” he said, predicting that in Afghanistan, creating adequate security will be a three to five year project. Zinni’s views on stability operations, as well as humanitarian and reconstruction efforts carry significant weight, given his experience in such work during Operation Provide Comfort in Turkey and northern Iraq in the early 1990s, Operation Restore Hope in Somalia, and other humanitarian missions in the Philippines and elsewhere. The general didn’t exactly strike a hopeful note when it comes to civilian agencies being able to work in an environment like Afghanistan, bluntly stating “let’s own up and give it to the military.” He expressed hope that the Pentagon will stand up a Civil Affairs command to try and coordinate such work, but warned that “we have a long way to go before we get to real integration of civil and military actions,” comparing the difficulties of operating in such a joint manner to the headaches the American military experienced when the services first started to move toward joint operations in the 1990s.