War, the military, COIN and stuff

Marines Sending in the Tanks

There has been some skepticism over the Marine Corps’ decision to send a company of M1 Abrams tanks to join the battle in southern Afghanistan, but the use of tanks in a counterinsurgency in general, and in Afghanistan in particular, is hardly new.

In Afghanistan, the Canadians and the Danes have used their tanks to great effect--and Canadian Army Maj. Trevor Cadieu has written a detailed acocunt on how tanks became an integral part of the Canadian fight in Kandahar—the place U.S. Marines are fighting now. In December 2006, the Canadians deployed a squadron of Leopard C2 tanks to Kandahar, and he Major writes that “after deploying forward… the tank squadron and armoured engineers featured prominently in all major combat operations undertaken by the Canadian BG… Since May 2007, the tank squadron has fought almost constantly alongside Canadian and Afghan infantry in close combat with the Taliban.”

The Canadians say that they’ve found so much success in Afghanistan with the German-made Leopard tank that they completely revised plans for the structure of their ground forces. In 2001, the Canadians decided not to replace their aging fleet of Leopard I tanks—the plan was to simply ride them until they died and then transition to a lighter force structure using the Stryker-like LAV infantry carriers as their heaviest piece of equipment. It wasn’t long before the heavy fighting and the toll that powerful roadside bombs Canadian troops encountered in southern Afghanistan changed this calculus, however, prompting the Ottawa government to kick off a “crash program” to buy surplus German and Dutch Leopard II tanks, which began arriving in Afghanistan in 2008.

Please  read the rest of this post over at ARES

McCain, Unbound

Speaking at a daylong gathering sponsored by the new conservative/neocon foreign policy shop the Foreign Policy Initiative this morning, Sen. John McCain said that he is concerned about the isolationist tendencies of some his incoming Congressional Republican colleagues, and made some very pointed remarks about the Russian government.

Speaking with the Brookings Institution’s Robert Kagan, McCain said that “I worry, I worry a lot,” about his new Republican colleagues in Congress when it comes to their attitudes toward the war in Afghanistan and the ongoing mission in Iraq. He singled out “I think there are going to be some tensions within our party,” he said, “and I don’t know incoming Senator Rand Paul—I respect him, I admire his victory—but already he is talking about withdrawals, and cuts in defense, and a number of others are [as well.]”

Paul, who has said that he hasn’t thought much about the war in Afghanistan and that “can we say that gradually we don't need as large of an Army if we're not in two wars? Yes, I think you can say that. You can save money there,” is a bit of an unknown on where exactly he stands on defense issues. But he is clearly making some Republicans nervous.             

But it isn’t just Paul that McCain is concerned about. He seems wary of the entire crop of Tea Part-endorsed Republicans currently making their way to D.C. for their freshman orientation. “There’s no doubt that this new group of Republicans have come in with a commitment to take an axe to spending,” McCain continued. “I’m not sure that you could say, ok, everything in defense is sacrosanct, while the rest of these cuts in education and social programs are taking place, so I worry a lot about the rise of protectionism and isolationism in the Republican party.”

Please read the rest at ARES...

Army Looking for New Ground Penetrating Radar

                           U.S. soldiers looking for IED cache in Iraq. (Pic: Paul McLeary)

Do you have an idea for a vehicle-mounted, ground penetrating radar that can detect improvised explosive devices (IEDs) made of anything from metal, to plastic, to wood, which may contain either conventional or homemade explosives? Also, it would be useful if your solution could stream information to the vehicle operator in real time while also being able to transmit the data--in real time--to another vehicle up to 1 Km. away.

If you have a device that can meet these requirements, and if you can package your idea up by November 22nd, the U.S. Army’s Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) wants to hear from you. In a notice posted late last week, RDECOM announced that it wants to hear from industry on what it can bring to the fight to detect these kinds of non-metallic IEDs, so it can pass the information along to the Army Rapid Equipping Force.

If you’ve been paying attention to the fight in Afghanistan, it’s pretty clear what is happening here. Unlike Iraq where most IEDs were cobbled together using military munitions like artillery shells and landmines, and were triggered remotely using everything from command wire to cell phones to garage door openers, Afghan insurgents have taken a much different approach. Given the lack of munitions at their disposal, the Taliban and other insurgent groups construct their crude--yet effective--roadside bombs out of things like agricultural fertilizer or homemade explosives, often housing them in wooden boxes and relying on pressure plate designs that thwart the metal detectors and radio wave jammers that worked so well in Iraq. This has made them harder to detect, and has also meant an uptick in cheap bombs that are placed along footpaths that kill or injure soldiers when they step on them.

Please read the rest at ARES...

Book Review: The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution

  What constitutes a true military revolution? If you think you already have a pretty good idea, a look through Keith Shimko’s excellent new book The Iraq Wars and America’s Military Revolution may change your mind. The idea of a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) has taken quite a beating recently given the very public flameout of the Rumsfeld-era Future Combat Systems suite of technologies that would have given the American soldier an almost impossibly perfect situational awareness of the battlefield. That laudable goal collided hea- on with the realities of the relatively low-tech counterinsurgencies that the United States has fought over the past decade, where the enemy both hides among the population and refuses to mass for conventional set-piece battles.  

But Shimko comes not to pile on, rather, he deftly traces the technological and doctrinal history of post-Vietnam American military advances, making the point that RMAs are not only technologically driven, but must also incorporate a rethinking of doctrine and tactics in order to truly succeed as a game changer. Shimko quotes liberally and deeply form some of the brightest minds in military thinking over the past several decades, balancing claims by both pro-RMA advocates as well as those who have tended to deride the idea that precision weapons and new communication technologies have truly changed the face of war. He quotes analyst Jeffrey Cooper as writing that the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs “may mark the closing of that era of warfare dominated by large military forces and equally large scopes of military operations. This RMA may usher in a new period of military contraction and a return to wars fought for limited objectives by valuable forces too precious to waste in mass, attrition-style warfare.” He also cites George and Meredith Friedman, who write that “for the first time in five hundred years, we are about to see a dramatic decrease in the size of land forces, without a decrease in military effectiveness.”  To balance this, Shimko relies heavily on the deep skepticism of Stephen Biddle, who fails to see anything revolutionary in the fire and maneuver that—even combined with precision weapons—marked the initial American foray into Afghanistan, and the large industrial-war style invasion of Iraq.

While an excellent summation of the debates surrounding military modernization and the effects—or potential effects—it may have on the battlefield that have taken place since the Vietnam war, the book nonetheless ends unevenly, with no real conclusion that states where Shimko falls. There are worse things however, and the history lesson leading up to the final pages is well worth the price of admission.

Update on the Senate Report

A spokesman from Armor Group writes in to comment on the senate report:

“We are unable to comment on the detail of the report as this is the first we have seen of it.

However, what we can say is that ArmorGroup engaged workers from two local villages as stated by the Senate Report – but did so only upon the recommendation and encouragement of U.S. Special Forces.  ArmorGroup personnel remained in close contact with U.S. Special Forces personnel to ensure that the company was constantly acting in harmony with, and in support of, U.S. military interests and desires.”

 This is partially borne out by the report itself, which says that one of the two Afghan men -- Mr. White and Mr. Pink -- contracted by the company to provide security forces for a U.S. air base, was in fact recommended by American military personnel. But blaming the whole mess on U.S. Special Forces isn't going to win the company any supporters.

 

 

Mr. White vs. Mr. Pink, Afghan Style

(Pic: Paul McLeary)

Described by one observer as acting like Mafia dons, Mr. White and Mr. Pink were fierce business rivals. With a lot of money at stake, and the power and prestige that come along with that money, Mr. Pink did something any ruthless criminal might do: he made an attempt on Mr. White’s life. The initial attempt in July 2007 failed, but a few months later, in the midst of a large firefight between Mr. Pink and Mr. White’s men in December 2007, Mr. White was shot three times and killed.

Sound like a movie plot? The names, in fact, have been borrowed from Reservoir Dogs, a brutal Quentin Tarantino flick, but the event s are all too real. They took place in Herat, Afghanistan, between two warlords who had been tapped by American and coalition forces to provide men to guard the Shindand Airbase, an American military installation. They also serve as the driving narrative in an explosive Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF!) issued late this afternoon on the role of private security contractors in Afghanistan.

The report, rolled out for reporters this morning by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), also tells the tale of two security contractors, Armor Group North America and EOD Technology, and the larger failure of American and international forces to contract out security work to Afghan nationals. The Senate Committee writes that in the course of its investigation, it “uncovered evidence of private security contractors funneling U.S. taxpayers dollars to Afghan warlord and strongmen linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery as well as Taliban and other anti-Coalition activities.”

The saga of Mr. White (real name Timor Shah) and Mr. Pink (Nadir Khan) is only part of the story, but deserves an airing. After Mr. White was killed by Mr. Pink, he then fled into the protection of the local Taliban while his men continued to work as security contractors for Armor Group at Shindand Airbase for more than a month. They were eventually fired for supplying intelligence about the base to Mr. Pink, who the U.S. military eventually identified as a “mid-level Taliban manager.”

Please read the rest over at ARES

 

The Next Army After Next

In Afghanistan, 94 percent of American fatalities occur within a mile of the enemy, while over 90 percent of combat deaths occur within 400 meters of the road -- and yet, Maj. Gen Robert Sacales says, the Department of Defense’s research and development arm has all but ignored the needs of the dismounted, small-unit infantryman.

In an angry, at times funny, and certainly opinionated lunch session at Brookings earlier this week, Gen. Scales lambasted the DoD for failing to provide small infantry units with the same protections and technological innoations enjoyed by other service branches, even though  “four out of five combat deaths are suffered by a force that comprises less than four percent of the total uniformed personnel in the DoD.”

Scales wants to see more tactical UAVs that can operate in austere, foul-weather conditions, and better computer-generated simulations and realistic training for soldiers before they deploy. But mostly he is disappointed with the research and development community for failing to give the needs of the infantryman the same thought as that given to airmen and sailors. “The Department of Defense scientific communities have never really made small units a priority for research and development at the national level,” he said, adding that his “greatest disappointment is DARPA. I don’t get it. We have over 6,000 dead Americans and over 34,000 wounded and maimed Americans in our military today, and I don’t know where DARPA is in this...It doesn’t appear as if the realities of the tactical battle have worked its way into the national scientific and technological entities that are out there.”

Scales pointed out the recent documentary on the small unit fight in Afghanistan, Restrepo, and a gripping 60 Minutes story from this past week as prime examples of the lack of innovation in infantry warfare. He noted that the weapons the soldiers use in the film and story (M4 rifles, 120mm mortars, M2 machine guns) were essentially the same that he fought with in Vietnam forty years ago, and that such a lack of innovation is tragic. “I would just like the Secretary of Defense or someone in high authority just to proclaim that dominance on the tactical battlefield is important for the nation,” he pleaded. “I haven’t heard it. I’d like to see those inside the Beltway pledge the human and physical resources necessary to make sue out military is as dominant on the ground as it is today in the air, cyberspace and on the sea.”

...Read the rest posted at ARES...

In the Desert with the NIKs and the UGS

In 2012, the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division will deploy to Afghanistan, and when they do, they will be bringing along with them a good chunk of what remains of the Future Combat Systems package--a suite of technologies that at one time included everything from a ground vehicle unmanned ground and air vehicles to soldier radios.

Despite the hype surrounding Secretary Gates’ “canceling” of the program in April 2009, much of the FCS kit continues life in two separate programs, the Ground Combat Vehicle program which replaced the Manned Combat Vehicle, and the E-IBCT [ahem, Early Infantry Brigade Combat Team] package which consists of such FCS stalwarts as the Urban and Tactical Unattended Ground Sensors; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle; and the Network Integration Kit (NIK) which enables data sharing and the Command and Control (C2) of systems.

About 800 soldiers from the Army Evaluation Task Force have been camped out in the desert at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico since June, putting these technologies (save the Ground Combat Vehicle) through their paces in a series of faceoffs between two small American-manned forward operating bases (complete with Afghan National Army soldiers) and two “Afghan villages” populated by soldiers playing locals who were sitting on hidden weapons caches, launching IED attacks, and trying to disrupt American operations.

Standing in front of a Taliban “safe house” last Friday, Lt. Col. Luke Peterson, product manager for network systems for PEO Integration told ARES that “we’re really stressing the network” during these tests, with soldiers sending and receiving a large volume of data over the network just like they would during real operations. “This is now a planning factor for the commander,” Peterson said. “How do I plan my network? How do I fight my network? Where do I strategically place my assets in the field so I can optimize the bandwidth to the right unit that might need it at that time?”

Read the rest over at ARES...

Massive Spending Vs. Wise Budgeting

It’s no secret that after nearly a decade of massive outlays for two shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a whole host of programs -- the Littoral Combat Ship, JASSM, F-35, Future Combat Systems, the Marines’ EFV -- that have exploded budgetary estimates and their production schedules, that something had to give over at the Pentagon.

After the financial meltdown that hit home in 2008 put even further stain on federal budgets, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates began bluntly stating that this way of doing the Pentagon's business was coming to a close, cancelling the F-22 and FCS programs and more recently tasking the military services with finding $100 billion in overhead savings during the next five years.

Earlier this month, Gates also announced that he was cutting funding for contractors, freezing hiring, eliminating the Joint Forces Command and two other Pentagon agencies, and taking the axe to 150 senior executive service positions and 50 general and flag officer positions. The moves aren’t just about cutting the defense budget, he said, but instead "It's about reforming and reshaping priorities to ensure that, in tough budgetary and economic times, we can focus defense resources where they belong: in America's fighting forces, investment in future capabilities and, most important, on our men and women in uniform."

A tight economic climate isn’t just an American problem, however. In a good little summation of the global nature of the economic downturn, The Economist reports

This week Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany’s defence minister, said he favoured suspending conscription, with the option of resuming it later, in order to create a “smaller but better and more operational” army that would shrink by a third, to about 165,000. The move is part of Germany’s plan to cut €8.3 billion ($10.5 billion) from the defence budget by 2014. Even Britain, which has the largest European force in Afghanistan, is likely to cut defence spending by 10-20% over the next five years, following an overdue defence review in the autumn. Spain cut defence spending by 9% this year; Italy will chop by 10% next. Less drastically, France is freezing defence expenditure.

Left out of this equation is China, a country whose military ambitions are beginning to make headlines in the west. This past spring, Chinese officials announced that its military budget -- or one should say its publicly available military budget -- will rise by 7.5 percent in 2010, a rate only about half recent published increases and the first to fall below 10 percent since 1989.

While the United States will vastly outspend the rest of the world for the foreseeable future on its armed forces, at what point does spending wisely--and keeping to strict budgets--become more important than spending massively?

The Numbers game in Afghanistan

U.S. and Afghan forces on patrol. Pic: Paul McLeary

When it comes to building a reliable and effective national security force, one of the critical questions to be answered is which is more important, quality or quantity. Up until late last year, says Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the American officer in charge of overseeing the recruitment and training of all Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), the focus was on quantity, and quality suffered. Speaking on a conference call earlier today, Caldwell said that his command is trying to bring the two a little closer together by growing the force while focusing on things like literacy,  drug use, and professionalism, but some of the number the General used to illustrate the difficulties ahead were less than enouraging.

Given the current attrition rates for both the army and the police, in order for the ANSF to hit its October 2011 goal of 305,000 personnel, an additional 56,000 cops and soldiers will need to be recruited, trained, equipped and fielded. But in order to do that, a staggering 141,000 soldiers and police will have to enter the pipeline to hit that 56,000 number. That means 85,000 of that 141,000 that NATO spends money on not only to recruit and train--but to issue paychecks--will simply vanish.  “If I can put that into some context for you,” the general said, “in order to meet the 2011 goal, we will need to recruit and train, in the next 15 months, approximately the same number as the total strength of the Afghan National Army today.”

That is stunning. Let’s break that down. The Afghan army today has 134,000 soldiers. By next October, that number is slated to swell to 171,000--meaning 37,000 more soldiers need to be trained and fielded over the next 15 months. But in order for that to happen, Caldwell said, “we're going to have to recruit, train and assign 86,000 more people to the army in order to make that growth of 37 thousand.” That means 49,000 men will walk after receiving some form of training/pay/equipping.

And then there is the famously beleaguered, and just as famously corrupt, Afghan police. Their ranks number about 115,000 today, and by October 2011, the force is set to grow to 134,000. But to make that growth of 19,000, NATO is going to have to recruit, train and assign almost 56,000 men. That means 37,000 would-be cops are going to eat up money, resources, and the time of the already thinly-spread trainers, primarily U.S. armed forces personnel. Overall, NATO trainers--who are still only staffed up to about 60 percent of their intended capacity--will have spent time training 85,000 soldiers and cops over the next 15 months, with nothing to show for it.