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.

Comments

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 11/20/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.

http://www.thunderrun.us/2009/11/from-front-11202009.html