War, the military, COIN and stuff

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

 

Fighting Over the Fighting Prowess of Afghan Forces

(Afghan Army soldiers prepare for a misison. Pic: Paul McLeary)

A congressionally-mandated Inspector General report released last week offered an extremely harsh assessment of the job that the NATO/ISAF command tasked with training and mentoring Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) has been doing--and the report itself has in turn been criticized by the American general who heads up the training command.

The report from the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)—an outfit funded by Congress in each defense spending bill since 2008--says that despite the fact that the United States has spent $27 billion on training and equipping the Afghan army and police since 2002, the rating system to measuring their progress has been largely ineffective, and as such, the United States government does not have a good handle on ANSF readiness. Since training a competent Afghan army and police force that can operate independently of NATO troops is the cornerstone of the alliance’s strategy for the war, no more serious or consequential change can be levied against the war effort.

But just how ineffective has the system been? According to SIGAR, the system “has not provided reliable or consistent assessments of ANSF capabilities,” even though NATO has been using what it calls the Capability Milestone (CM) rating system since 2005. While the system has been the main tool used for measuring the development of ANSF capabilities, it has also recently been scrapped by the NATO Training Mission (NTM-A) because its measurements were too subjective, and didn’t capture the true ability of Afghan forces to operate on their own, according with one American Army officer who spoke with ARES.

Since the rating system has recently changed and given that the audit work was conducted from October 2009 through May 2010, the head of the NATO Training Mission U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William Caldwell shot back in his official response that the report is “based on data that is six months old. The findings in this report do not accurately represent the current state of the Afghan National Security Force...this report is not only inaccurate, but it is potentially damaging.”

In total, the main charges that SIGAR outlines in the report are that measurements used in the assessment system “have overstated operational capabilities,” that “top-rated ANSF units have not indicated a capability to sustain independent operations,” and “ANSF capability reports have included outdated assessment data.”

As of the end of March 2010, ISAF reported CM ratings for 150 Afghan army and 130 Afghan police units, finding that “approximately 23 percent of those army units and 12 percent of police units received the highest rating, CM1,” meaning that they can operate independently. But not all of these units were actually capable of operating on their own due to attrition and the disturbing trend of Afghan units “backsliding” in effectiveness once NATO mentors leave. The SIGAR report found that 38 percent of army units, and 66 percent of police units, “had regressed at least one level” from February 2009 to January 2010.

Colonel John Ferrari, the deputy of programs for NTM-A told ARES that this regression can be explained in a number of ways, two of the most significant being the rapid growth of ANSF and the difficulties of training units in a combat zone. Since the ANSF is constantly expanding, trained leaders are often bounced around to different units, and some units don’t rate as well once they lose an effective leader, Ferrari said. When it comes to the police, some trained units may encounter newly formed, and better armed, Taliban groups that move into their area once NATO forces leave, which decreases the effectiveness of the unit.

NTM-A’s new rating process is called the Commanders Unit Assessment Tool, and Col. Ferrari says that since it is more subjective, it is also more accurate. As opposed to the recent past, “the embedded mentors stay with the units longer,” and instead of rating them with a 1, 2, 3, 4, rating where ‘1’ means they can operate independently, the categories have been expanded. ”We don’t have the [numbered] category anymore,” he said, “since if they’re operating independently, that can’t be rated. Now we rate them whether they‘re effective with advisors, whether they’re effective with assistance, whether they’re dependent on the coalition for success, or whether they’re barely effective or ineffective, so it’s tiered on how much assistance they need from coalition forces.”

But with more ANSF forces, that means that more NATO trainers and mentors are needed. The SIGAR report also found that as of April 2010, NTM-A was only staffed at 52 percent of its needed capacity. Ferrari said that as of early July, the command is “up to about 60 or 70 percent” of its desired staffing level and is waiting for some help from European allies. “A lot of those NATO trainers have been pledged, but they just haven’t come in.” To mitigate that shortfall, president Obama has authorized two infantry battalions from the United States to temporarily fill in the gaps left by the unfulfilled NATO commitments.

All of this begs one big question. If NATO claims that its ticket out of Afghanistan is through training a reasonably effective Afghan security force, how can western governments possibly under staff the command charged with training these forces? While Col. Ferrari pointed out that the Afghan National Army Training Command is working on the technical training aspects for skills like logistics, engineering, signals, and training non-commissioned officers—he also rightly pointed out that building a security force from scratch, while expecting it to fight immediately, is a complicated long-term project that takes years to complete. But with NATO beginning its pullout next year, Afghan forces don’t have that long.

Restrepo

During the 90 minutes it took for an invited audience to sit though a screening of Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s new documentary about the war in Afghanistan last Monday night, the Department of Defense announced the deaths of six more American Soldiers and Marines. But just as the vast majority of Americans will never see the names of the six service members killed, nor will they ever likely see or even hear of this arresting film that chronicles the sometimes desperate combat experiences of a small group of young Americans.

Restrepo, the much-lauded documentary that chronicles the 12 months that  Battle Company of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade spent in Afghanistan’s remote Korengal Valley is in all respects a jarring movie, and to their credit the filmmakers avoid the temptation to rely on easy sensationalism or jingoism to try and sell it. But for all of the great press that the movie has been receiving, some claims about its singularity might be a little overstated. The excellent 2006 documentary, The War Tapes, which used footage shot by National Guard soldiers in Iraq covers much the same ground--albeit in a much different war, under much different circumstances. (The two films actually serve as pretty good markers for their respective conflicts -- Restrepo is a fight based around a fixed mountaintop fortification that sees almost daily violence, while the War Tapes follows a unit that provides convoy support across the flat expanse of IED-leaden desert roads.)

Not surprisingly, most reviews of Restrepo have focused on the movie’s steady stream of violence, since in the end that is what puts butts in the seats--but some of the most cringe-inducing scenes have nothing to do with combat. Instead, the film shows the difficulties inherent in asking Army officers and enlisted men to do two jobs at once: fight a war against an elusive and dedicated enemy, while at the same time acting as community outreach coordinators and economic advisors to groups of skeptical, impoverished Korengali villagers. In one scene, an American Sergeant excitedly tells the camera that a small group of Afghan elders has come to the embattled mountaintop combat outpost to talk, something that hasn’t happened before. It turns out that the elders have come to complain that the Americans have killed one of their cows, and they want compensation. The Sgt. radios his commander, who says he won’t pay, but will give the men sacks of rice and beans that equal the weight of their cow. The villagers don’t seem to be happy with this arrangement, but neither does the Sgt., who knows that he has just insulted men who he is trying to make his allies.

Other telling moments come when U.S. Army Captain Dan Kearney tries to win over skeptical locals by telling them that a road being built through the valley (which is the reason the Americans are there in the first place) will make them rich. It's obvious that they neither believe him nor are much interested in the road project--since they have heard promises from Americans before--but instead ask why some of their neighbors have been arrested. Kearney tells them that he has good intelligence linking the men to crimes, but the villagers remain unconvinced. In the end, neither side is willing to fully trust the other, and given the constant attacks on the American outpost, the refusal of the locals to provide intel on who is doing the shooting, and the complete absence of any representative of the Afghan government, little progress is ever made in the relationship.

Restrepo is what population-centric counterinsurgency looks like once it leaves the world of Powerpoint and the think tank seminar and enters the world of combat. It’s ambiguous, it’s unfair, it’s confusing, and people still end up dead. It’s the modern American way of war.  

Book Review: Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War

 

After returning home in February, 2008 from a month-long embed with a U.S. Army Stryker Brigade (1st Battalion, 21st Infantry, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, to be exact) operating in the farmland northwest of Baghdad, I kept in contact with several junior officers I had met. One of these soldiers—a West Point-educated second Lieutenant stationed at a small company sized combat outpost—would later complain how his company was ordered back to Camp Victory, the sprawling Forward Operating Base (FOB) in Baghdad to serve out the last few months of their tour. This meant a life surrounded by the bureaucratic-minded “Fobbits” who never left the security of the base, and worse, that the mostly self-sufficient adventure of life outside the wire was all but over, replaced with the drudgery of garrison life.  

For infantry grunts like this lieutenant, whom I had seen arrest suspected insurgents, roll up a significant cache of weapons and explosives, deal with the deadly aftermath of a suicide bomber, and work through and with sketchy local Iraqi allies, to be ordered back to a place like Victory was a special kind of punishment. But orders are orders. I was reminded of this kind of Big Army logic while reading a book written by another young lieutenant who served with the Strykers of the 25^th Division’s 2nd Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment in Iraq during the “Surge” years of 2007-2008. Lt. Matt Gallagher was a platoon commander who, writing under the name Lt. G, launched a blog during his deployment to keep family and friends updated on what life as a grunt was like in Iraq. Dubbing it "Kaboom: A Soldier's War Journal," the blog quickly took off and attracted a readership among the milblog community and beyond, and as such, eventually drew the ire of his commanding officers. After Gallagher turned down a promotion that would mean a move to a desk job away from his men, he blogged about the dressing down he received from his commanding officer, calling it “an illogical backlash from higher, acting like a spurned teenage blonde whose dreamboat crush tells her point-blank that he prefers brunettes.”

That got the blog pulled, and guaranteed that the next “bullshit tasking” that came up had his name on it. And that tasking came down the not long after, sending Gallagher to a desk job back at Camp Taji, the large FOB his unit officially called home. Out of the Army since 2008, Gallagher has now written a book about his 15 months in Iraq.

Gallagher’s smart, honest, and introspective book joins the best of the literary output we’ve seen come out of Iraq, up there with Nate Fick’s One Bullet Away and Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War as essential reading for anyone who wants to read superlative first-hand accounts of life on the ground. (Filkins of course isn’t a soldier, but still captured many ground truths during his extensive reporting from Iraq in 2003-2008.) Gallagher’s book stands apart from those memoirs however, in that it is—from start to finish—laugh out loud hilarious. This isn’t to say that it is more or less “real” than any of those other books, but Gallagher brilliantly captures the pop-culture-infused profanities, practical jokes and gallows humor shared by grunts in the field better than any other book of the post-9/11 era.  

Like his blog, the book is stacked full of the weird mix of tension, comedy, absurdity, loyality, boredom, frustration, and fear that makes modern American conflict what it is. But for all the comedy that Gallagher is capable of slinging, (his men took to naming a stun gun “Cultural Awareness,” and dubbed an Iraqi with unusually long fingers “Sheik Banana-Hands”) there are also moments of prose that light up the page:

“The flowers and hugs and cheers from the liberation only lasted a few months before one stare became ten stares, became one hundred stares. Suddenly the stare was the norm, house by house, block by block, and town to town, and all the flower petals dried up, and we suddenly recognized that those cheers of gratitude were actually pleas for salvation. There were thousands of them, and they were everywhere. This pattern of starbursting degeneration, roughly translated from Arabic, meant occupation.”

Wars—even insurgencies—are titanic struggles fought by large, impersonal groups, but to the combatant there is nothing impersonal about the experience. Everyone’s war is different. Everyone’s war is their own. Gallagher’s book shows that while Big Army will always win the battle of wills, every soldier, even the most obedient, is an individual, and this might be one of the Army's greatest strengths in the first decade of our new, confused millennium. 

World Politics Review: Merida Initiative: Working From the Bottom Up in Mexico

I have a story over at World Politics Review about the Merida Initiative, the $1.3 billion aid package that the U.S.  is giving to Mexico to bolster its law enforcement capabilities to fight the increasingly powerful and violent drug cartels. Check it out here . And the meat of the piece is here:

As with any program of this scope and size, some critics have called Merida an example of the militarization of American foreign policy, while others have found fault with the apparent slow pace with which the money and equipment have actually made it to Mexico. Indeed, according to the Government Accountability Office, at the start of 2010, only about $23 million of that $1.3 billion has actually been spent, due to red tape, procurement problems and disorganization at the State Department and elsewhere in the U.S. government.

But a true accounting of how much has been delivered is complicated. In January, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) chimed in with its own estimate, reporting that $77.2 million worth of equipment had been delivered to Mexico by the end of December 2009, including 30 ion scanners and five Bell helicopters for the Mexican army. Another $135.5 million in equipment is scheduled to be delivered by June 2010, including a $50 million CASA maritime patrol aircraft for the Mexican navy. In April, the CRS reported that "the pace of implementation has quickened in Mexico since the GAO reporting period ended, as a total of approximately $113 million worth of equipment had arrived by March 2010, but implementation challenges remain."

A State Department official, who spoke to World Politics Review on condition of anonymity, cautioned against reading too much into the seemingly slow pace of Merida money allocated for particular projects. "Just because money has not been expended does not mean that the training or programs are not going forward," the official claimed, adding that "this is a common misperception and very misleading."

Because of accounting procedures, money is often not considered spent until the final bills come in, typically at the very end of the period for which it has been allocated. As an example, the Mexican government asked for extensive modifications to the Blackhawk helicopters that came off the assembly line in the Sikorsky plant in January, thereby delaying their delivery. As a result, the State official said, "The money still shows up in the allocated file, rather than the expended file."

Russians v. Pirates

Read this about the absolutely miserable conditions aboard Russian Naval vessels, and then consider what life is like for the Somali pirates that were captured by the Russian warship, Marshal Shaposhidov yesterday of the coast of Somalia.

 

From EU NAVFOR Somalia:

Yesterday morning the Liberian flagged (Russian operated) oil tanker, MOSCOW UNIVERSITY, was hijacked approximately 350 miles east of Socatra. It was reported that the crew had locked themselves into the “rudder compartment” and a Maritime Patrol aircraft made contact with the crew a few hours later to confirm that they were safe.

Early this morning, the Marshal Shaposhnikov arrived at the oil tanker Moscow University’s position and sent a helicopter to investigate. The helicopter was fired upon by the pirates holding the ship. The Russian warship, knowing the crew were locked down and safe, returned fire on the pirates. Eventually the pirates surrendered and a boarding team from the Marshal Shaposhnikov arrived onboard the Tanker, captured all the pirates and freed the crew. All the crew are safe and well.

(Pic: Marshal Shaposhidov, from EU NAVFOR)

Mexican Gangs Infiltrating U.S. Border Police?

It should come as no surprise that the spiraling narcogang-related violence in Mexico is spurring business for companies providing protection from the chaos of the streets. The Homeland Security Newswire reports this morning that for one company, sales for their armored vehicles are up a whopping 300 percent over the past 18 months. Mark Burton, CEO of International Armoring Corp. told HSW that most customers live in El Paso, Texas, but have business dealings across the border in Juárez, Mexico—which has been dubbed the “murder capital of the world” after having seen 2,600 murders in 2009 with another 227 assassinations related to organized crime in January of this year alone.

The vehicles, which cost about $72,000 on average to convert—a price that doesn’t include the cost of the vehicle—have their entire passenger compartment lined with armor, and have their glass replaced with two-inch ballistic armored windows to protect against attacks from handguns and weapons like AK-47s and AR-15s.

The border region has become so chaotic that U.S. border officials have been warned that the Mexican gang suspected of killing three people linked to the U.S. consulate in Juárez last week may be planning further strikes against U.S. officers, and the El Paso Intelligence Center has advised law enforcement officials along the border “to wear their protective vests and alert their own family members to the threat.”

What’s more, a few weeks ago, a Mexican Navy helicopter crossed the border while chasing suspects, and was seen hovering over a neighborhood in Brownsville, Tx., according to local reports. Zapata County, Tx. Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez told the San AntonioExpress News that “It's always been said that the Mexican military does in fact ... that there have been incursions…But this is not New Mexico or Arizona. Here we've got a river; there's a boundary line. And then of course having Falcon Lake, Falcon Dam, it's a lot wider. It's not just a trickle of a river, it's an actual dam. You know where the boundary's at.”

The incursion happened during vicious fighting between two Mexican drug gangs, the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, a conflict that is spilling over the border. Tomake matters worse, Mexican gangs are reportedly actively trying to infiltrate the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, and as a result, 576 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents had corruption cases opened against them last year. The Express also reported that “in the past two years, there have been 400 public corruption cases involving federal, state and local law enforcement agents originating from the Southwest border region.”

The story of the national security threat along the southern border of the United States hasn’t received a ton of front-page press until recently, but from the looks of things, this might only be the beginning.

More Money, More Projects, for Anti-IED Shop

A vehicle smoulders after a suicide bomber rammed his car into a checkpoint in Iaq. (Pic: Paul McLeary)

Since its inception in 2006, the Pentagon has funneled about $20 billion to its anti-IED shop, the Joint IED Defeat Organization--known as JIEDDO--a figure that includes the $3.4 billion the Obama administration is asking Congress to approve in FY 2011, a boost from the $2.2 billion approved in FY 2010. And the organization expects to receive more money in 2010 to support the surge in American forces to Afghanistan.

According to new information posted on the program’s Web site, JIEDDO’s FY 2011 plans identify over 200 projects, including “counter-IED force protection, exploitation of device signatures, counter-IED persistent surveillance, sensor data fusion, and network analysis.” The technologies JIEDDO is throwing into the fight in Afghanistan run the gamut from the “Self-Protection Adaptive Roller Kit (SPARK)”—otherwise known as a roller bolted on the front of a vehicle to pre-detonates pressure-plate IEDs—to the unfortunately-named VADER (Evil Empire references, anyone?) program. The Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar “can detect, track and characterize suspicious enemy actions – mounted and dismounted – in real-time and in high-resolution using the VADER system. The system is a combination of state-of-the-art hardware sensors and exploitation-focused software on both Army and Air Force aerial platforms,” the site says.

Twenty billion, even in today’s environment where increasingly large military outlays have become the rule, is real money. And JIEDDO has had its share of problems in recent years. This past fall in particular was rough on the organization, as then-director Gen. Steven Metz admitted to an incredulous Congress in October that the organization keeps no centralized database on IED information it has collected. Just a month later, the Pentagon launched a new anti-IED task force, led by Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter and Marine Corps Lt. Gen. John Paxton, tasked with exploring the IED problem and coming up with possible solutions in Afghanistan, essentially duplicating JIEDDO’s profile.

At the time, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told me that this move didn’t signal a vote of no confidence in JIEDDO. “This is more than a JIEDDO problem,” he said. “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.”

Despite the fact that it’s working to defeat a threat that has been responsible for more American combat deaths than any other weapon since 2001, JIEDDO hasn’t been made part of the Pentagon’s base budget, and is forced to rely on supplemental funds on a year-to-year basis. This creates problems, particularly when it comes to giving the shop the bureaucratic teeth to compel the services branches to share their own closely-held anti-IED research and development information that they themselves use to justify funding on a year-to-year basis. This isn’t to say that the services don’t play nice with JIEDDO—they do when it benefits them—and the organization played a big role in several big-ticket programs, including upgrading the armor on Stryker vehicles before they deployed to Afghanistan last summer.

Venezuela Looking at Aruba and the Antilles?

Galrahn from the indispensable Information Dissemination blog emailed yesterday with some more information about Venezuela's strategic interests in the Caribbean, following up on an earlier Ares post about why the country's president Hugo Chavez might launch military action against Aruba and the Antilles.

For both countries, the main interest in public from Venezuela is due to Venezuela's real problem in refinery capacity. There are actually two problems. First, the lack of international investment, which is why almost all of their oil exports go to the US, Netherlands Antilles, or Aruba. Second, Venezuela produces dirty, heavy crude and it costs a lot to get and refine.

For example, The Valero owned refinery on Aruba produces 275,000-bbl/d. PdVSA leases the 320,000-bbl/d Isla refinery on the island of Curacao. Those two facilities should be compared to Venezuela's total domestic 1.28 million barrels per day (bbl/d) of crude oil refining capacity in 2009 (Venezuelan ownership of both would represent a 50% increase). Both facilities are capable of handling Venezuela's dirty heavy crude, indeed all the oil refined at both facilities comes from Venezuela.

It should be noted Valero is the only company that will run a refinery on Aruba. Why? Because Valero is an American company. Exxon pulled out in 1985, and Royal Dutch/Shell group has avoided it.

Further background - it is why the Dutch are building the Holland class OPVs, and why they are serious and always out front as a partner regarding the F-35. The Dutch don't trust Chavez, and will occasionally mention Venezuela when discussing the need for cruise missiles (air and sea launched), and have even mentioned him in the context of future BMD at sea.

The offshore oil reserves of Aruba are speculated by oil watchers to be massive, but their actual amount is a closely guarded secret of Royal Dutch/Shell group. This is the often unspoken but implied point of tension between Venezuela and Aruba.