War, the military, COIN and stuff

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.

Weighing Options on an Afghan Strategy

 
Camels hold up an American/Afghan patrol in Afghanistan (pic: Paul McLeary)

Lt. Col. Brian Lamson, military advisor to Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s point man on Afghanistan and Pakistan, insisted that he wasn’t trying to get out in front of the White House. But when an officer in his position declares that “we’re not going to see a shift from counterinsurgency strategy” in Afghanistan, ears perk up.

Lamson was speaking at the annual meeting of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade organization and governing body for private military contractors in Washington on Wednesday, and his remarks sounded a bit like those we read in the New York Times this morning about the Afghan options the Obama administration is considering. The president hasn’t yet made up his mind as to what the strategy will be, but the Times reports that “the debate is no longer over whether to send more troops, but how many more will be needed to guard the most vital parts of the country.” The plan seems to be coalescing around protecting major population centers like Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kunduz, Herat, Jalalabad, and several “village clusters,” as well as areas of Helmand, the country’s breadbasket. The idea is to split the difference between Gen. McChrystal’s 40,000 troop plus-up and his plans to conduct a population-centric counterinsurgency campaign, and vice president Biden’s strategic pullout, which he thinks can be mitigated by the use of unmanned drones and targeted Special Forces raids. As one source told the Times, the plan is “McChrystal for the city, Biden for the country.”

Biden’s plan, of course, would necessitate a massive influx of airborne ISR assets into the country to make up for the lack of boots on the ground in outlying areas, assets which would try and keep the Taliban off balance until Afghan forces could be trained and deployed in such numbers that they could then spread out across the country. Like anything else in Afghanistan, the plan is risky, and it begs several questions. Do we have the ISR assets available (even if they’re transferred from Iraq) to keep “eyes on” areas of interest? Can the Special Forces handle such an outsize and long-term mission? How long would we have to keep this up before the Afghan Army and police could move in?

Spending a couple weeks in Khost province in eastern Afghanistan last month, I saw firsthand how even in areas where there was a coalition presence, the Taliban still owned the ground outside of the FOB and could lob rockets and mortars at American bases at will. Within a few weeks at a remote joint American Army / Afghan Army outpost in Khost, one Afghan soldier was kidnapped and killed, and an American Cougar MRAP was blown up by an explosives-laden car as it left the gate of the compound, killing one soldier and injuring several others. This was in addition to regular mortar and rocket attacks on the camp that wounded several Afghan soldiers. Pulling troops out of these austere outposts would obviously put an end to attacks like these—at least in the countryside—but it would also allow the Taliban to concentrate on their own civil affairs campaigns in villages, rather than spending their time planning IEDs and launching mortars.

IEDs in Kandahar

It’s being reported that the two IED attacks that killed eight American soldiers in Kandahar yesterday were carried out against Stryker vehicles, the quick-moving eight-wheeled tactical vehicles that had so much success in Iraq over the past several years.

If the initial reports are true then the attacks would have hit the 5^th Brigade, 2^nd Infantry Division, based in Ft. Lewis, Washington, who were deployed to Afghanistan in July with the task of carrying out the experiment of being the first Stryker unit to tackle the harsh terrain of southern Afghanistan. Since July, the 5/2 has been in almost constant contact, up until this week losing eighteen soldiers, with the 1^st Battalion, 17^th Regiment—fighting in the Arghandab River valley north of Kandahar city—taking the brunt of the casualties, losing twelve soldiers. As the FOB Tacoma blog recently noted,

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, only five other Fort Lewis Stryker battalions have lost 10 or more soldiers, and those were sustained over a full 12- or 15-month deployment. The 1-17 and its parent brigade have been deployed less than three months.

The Stryker is a great vehicle, and the soldiers of the 2/25 Strykers that I embedded with in Iraq last year loved them—even if they had to pile sandbags on the floor to add an extra layer of protection against IEDs—but as we’ve come to see in Iraq and Afghanistan, if you build a better truck, the insurgents will build a bigger—if not better—bomb.

The Good Soldiers

There is no bigger temptation, or greater mistake, a journalist can make when covering troops in combat than to insert him or herself into the narrative. The best reporters—like Dexter Filkins and C.J. Chivers to name just two—hover somewhere in the background, giving a first-hand account of the daily lives of the troops and the world they inhabit while remaining invisible in the overall narrative they construct.

This narrative approach is one of the reasons that The Good Soldiers by David Finkel is so effective, and so devastating. He doesn’t so much tell the stories of the men of the 2/16 “Rangers”—an infantry battalion sent into Baghdad in 2007 for a 15-month tour during the “Surge”—as let their story spill out onto the page in a proud, anguished, and confused roar. Quite simply, there hasn’t been a book by a journalist about the war in Iraq quite like this one.

This isn’t an anti-war book. It is simply a book about what men experience when their political leaders commit them to combat, and the ways those men find to try and complete their mission. It is also a book about the uncountable ways, both small and large, physical and mental, that young men and their leaders force themselves to perform feats of heroism, gut through acts of sheer will, and show moments of real love while fighting a war that only exists at the level of what they can see at any given moment. Daily headlines, bland casualty reports, political disagreements and large geopolitical questions tend to fog the intimate, personal realities of combat, but Finkel compassionately yet bluntly catalogs them in amazing detail, steering clear of making any political statements while novelistically playing the political fights in Washington against the roadside bombs and mortar attacks the 2/16 experienced on a daily basis in Baghdad.     

Finkel spent a total of eight months with the 2/16 during their deployment, living with them, talking to them before, during and after missions, heading out of the gate of their small Forward Operating Base and capturing the feelings and coping mechanisms of everyone from the lowliest private to the Lieutenant Colonel who led them. It is an absolutely brutal book—one of the few must-reads of the war—and beautiful in its own way. It is a book about war and its costs, and what men do when placed in impossible situations.

American Troops Leaving Iraq, Some Gear Staying

The American armed forces are due to end their combat mission in Iraq by August 31, 2010, with 50,000 or so troops slated to remain behind to continue training Iraqi forces and presumably offer assistance if the Baghdad government so requests. The Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and Iraq calls for all American troops to be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011.

That means that over the next ten months, some 70,000 American troops will be leaving Iraq without replacement, and they’ll be taking most—but not all—of their gear with them. Michele Flournoy, the Obama administration’s Under Secretary of Defense told Congress this week that while the Pentagon says that there are about 3.3 million American “pieces of equipment” in Iraq, and that “the majority of the equipment currently in Iraq will not be transferred to the Iraqis, but will remain with U.S. forces,” a significant chunk of gear will stay behind to be used by the Iraqi Security Forces.

We know that many MRAPs in Iraq—those not sent to Afghanistan—will go into prepositioned stocks overseas instead of being carted all the way back to the United States. But what about the rest of it?

Flournoy said that a variety of agencies are working on it. The Army Materiel Command has deployed its Reposture Retrograde Task Force to Kuwait and Baghdad, while the Air Forces Central Command and Marine Force Central Command have dispatched liaison officers to help out. What’s more, she continued, “equipment and materiel have been divided into the following four categories: (1) Equipment and material from the Iraq Joint Operations Area that will be refurbished and ultimately redistributed to U.S. forces in Afghanistan; (2) Equipment and material that will be retrograded to home stations; (3) Equipment and material that will be retrograded to depot/reset programs; or (4) Equipment and material that will be transferred to the Government of Iraq or the Government of Afghanistan.”

When it comes to the equipment that will be handed over to the Iraqis, Flournoy said that it will include “excess equipment” like “tool kits and sets, individual clothing and equipment items such as helmets and body armor, and commercial trucks,” as well as what she termed “non-excess” items such as “9mm pistols, cargo trucks, airfield control and operations systems, M1114 up-armored HWMMVs, and armored gun trucks.” The value of this non-excess gear is set to be capped at $750 million.

Lots more to come on this in the near future, for sure, especially when you take into account Flournoy’s words of warning about the woeful state of the Iraqi economy, and its ability to provide for its own defense needs: “given the Government of Iraq’s budget shortfalls and the ISF’s requirements,” she said, “the Iraqi government may ultimately require additional assistance beyond the transfer of excess and non-excess equipment. We are still evaluating how much and what type of additional assistance may be needed.”

In other words, the bill has yet to come.

An Inside Look at Task Force ODIN-Afghanistan

Task Force ODIN-A Warrior UAV at Bagram . (Photo: SSgt. Bryan Welch)

Seven years ago, U.S. Army Spc. Bryan Welch wandered through the crumbling Soviet-era buildings at Bagram Air Field outside Kabul as a young enlisted soldier, picking through the blasted hulks in the early days of the war in Afghanistan.

In 2009, the now 26-year-old staff sergeant came back to a vastly different Bagram to perform another mission. The new Bagram houses several thousand NATO troops, along with Burger Kings, Pizza Huts, wireless Internet and a bus system. Welch’s job this time is to be one of the new breed of Army enlisted men entrusted with piloting and operating the sensitive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) equipment on the Army’s Warrior Alpha unmanned air system.

“We’re hoping this opens the Army’s eyes—actually all of the military’s eyes—on what an enlisted man can do with an unmanned platform,” Welch says.

That’s how I kick off Part One of a two-part look at ODIN-Afghanistan in this week’s Aviation Week. The second part will be in the November issue of DTI. While ODIN-A is relatively short on assets—it only has four hellfire-armed Warrior Alpha UAVs in its unmanned arsenal, two of which are flying at any given time—and a classified number of unarmed manned aircraft, the soldiers of the Army’s 214^th Aviation Regiment are adding capabilities where they can. While at the ODIN HQ at Bagram air base last month I had the opportunity to watch real-time training missions where a Warrior laser designated a target while an Apache helicopter fired a Hellfire missile from beyond line of sight, hitting the test target square on the nose.

Captain Richard Koch, who runs the unmanned side of ODIN-A, told me that while the Warriors have only fired one lethal mission with their Hellfire missiles, “we’re doing a lot of designating” of targets for “a multitude of assets—Apaches, fast movers, indirect fires.” And before the manned aircraft even come on the scene, he said, “we’ve picked out targets so that as soon as they start arriving, we’re getting lethal and doing what needs to be done.”

Last week at the AUSA meeting in Washington, I had the chance to chat with the recently returned commander of ODIN-Iraq, Lt. Col. Mark Moser, who redeployed about a month ago. Moser told me that in Iraq, where ODIN has been operating since 2007, “we’ve reversed that where the Apaches lase and point out targets for us, as well as the other way around. It’s really manned and unmanned going both ways.”

While ODIN-A isn’t racking up the kills that ODIN-Iraq has become famous for, (the last count I can find is from January 2008, which listed 2,400 kills of insurgents planting IEDs, while arresting 141 more), you can probably consider it more of a resource problem than a lack of will. The enlisted soldiers I spoke with who are flying the UAVs out of Bagram are tied to some pretty restrictive—and largely classified—rules of engagement that make any Hellfire shot from a Warrior one that has to go through a long approval process in order to happen. Staff Sergeant Jason Irwin, who flew Hunter UAVs in Kosovo, and Warriors as part of ODIN-Iraq, and is now in Afghanistan told me that the long process required to fire a Hellfire, as opposed to the trust given to enlisted men to fire an M-1 tank round, “comes down to the pilot mentality because this is aviation. In armor they’re used to a grunt drives a tank, a grunt fires a tank, but in aviation it’s a rated pilot who flies and who decides when to shoot, so I think it's that mentality. I think its seeing PFC Carter [a 22 year-old Army Warrior pilot] over there on the trigger, there might be a little bit of pride there.”

We also shouldn’t expect miracles from unmanned aircraft. As SSgt. Welch told me, “These unmanned aircraft are doing great things, but you don’t hold ground with technology, it takes boots on the ground to hold it.”

US Army's Doctrine Wars

In the October issue of DTI, I've got a piece that tries to carve out a little bit of the discussion surrounding the future of U.S. Army doctrine. It's a big topic, so I tried to focus on some of the more tech-centric aspects of it. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution made some good points about the marriage of tech and doctrine in our conversation:

"The issue of doctrine is huge," says P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institution. "Choose the right doctrine and you've found the blitzkrieg of the 21st century; choose the wrong doctrine and you've come up with the Maginot Line." One of the major tasks for the Army is to try to articulate, to itself as well as to members of Congress who fund procurement, how it plans to exploit their greatest advantage emerging manned and unmanned systems and new communication and intelligence technologies. As Singer says, "the Army is trying to figure out how to use technology as an enabler" and create the conditions under which it retains tactical battlefield dominance.

Although the use of technology in Iraq and Afghanistan has produced undeniable tactical successes, it has yet to be tied to an overall strategy or doctrine. But that's coming. Examples of how the Army will transform itself in the future include the increasing use of lethal UAVs--the Army recently launched its first missile from a UAV in Afghanistan--as well as employment of the Land Warrior communications suite that platoon leaders in Stryker units in Iraq and Afghanistan have worn, better video feeds that can be passed quickly around the battlefield and non-lethal technologies. And all of those will have to start to shape organizational behavior, Singer says, from "tactics to doctrine to laws, ethics, questions about accountability, leadership within the force, personnel systems, you name it. And that is a ripple effect."

But technology will only take you as far as the people--and doctrine--guiding it allow, so also I spoke to a couple thinkers who are on opposite sides of the debate over how to structure the force of the future. A big part of this fight revolves around the "advise and assist" mission that many see as a major part of how the United States military will involve itself around the world in the upcoming years. In one corner is Col. Gian Gentile, who over the past several years has time and again voiced dissatisfaction with the growing role that counterinsurgency theory has assumed in Army doctrine, at the expense, he says, of more traditional infantry skills like fires and near-peer engagements.

Gentile also doesn't support the idea (floated over the past several years by military analysts like Andrew Krepinevich, Jr., and John Nagl) that what the Army needs to do is stand up training and advisory brigades to handle stability operations like those it confronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. "In my mind, it would be a whole lot better to have a slew of brigades trained in the basics," says Gentile, meaning combined arms warfare, so when they are deployed it would only take "a little bit of education about the area, the culture, the language and other things to sharpen knowledge of the 'human terrain,' while not losing their ability to seize and retain the initiative when it's time to fight."

In my chat with Lt. Gen. Michael Vane last week, he also leaned in this direction, saying that he doesn't see standalone advise and assist brigades being something that is in the Army's future, but instead forces should be trained across the spectrum of conflict from advise and assist missions to conventional combat.

On the other side of this fight stands Andrew Krepinevich, Jr. of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, who outlined a vision of an Army that has "two wings" to it. He told me that  "One [wing] is oriented primarily toward irregular warfare, and one is oriented primarily on conventional warfare, so that if you have a major contingency, you surge one wing of the force, and if it looks like the conflict is going to be protracted, the other force would have 12-15 months before you had to rotate out the first group. . . . I feel right now the force is over-weighted in favor of traditional operations."

There are obviously merits to both approaches: training an advisory brigade, or brigades, allows other elements of the force to concentrate on traditional an irregular combat skills,  but it also, in effect, creates two armies, which brings up a host of issues when it comes to resourcing and career advancement. Conversely, revamping training across the spectrum of conflict has the advantage of being able to surge troops from across the force to be meet any threat that comes up, while reducing possible dwell time issues if the United States is running multiple host nation security force training missions at once. But then again, how much training can we expect soldiers to be able to absorb? Is a competency in conventional war, COIN, and and now advise and assist mission too much be be expect a single soldier to master?

USAF Mentors Pass Skills To Afghan Pilots

The first of several long-form stories from my trip to Afghanistan last month. You can read the whole thing at Defense Technology International.

The first bit:
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In the shadow of several dilapidated buildings a few hundred yards north of Kabul’s international airport sits an old MiG-21 fighter, moldering among tall weeds shooting through cracks in the concrete. A little farther up a dirt road, there are two compounds recently refurbished by the U.S. that serve as schools and training centers for the Afghan National Army Air Corps. There are plans to clean up the MiG and place it in front of one of the reclaimed buildings as a monument.

Other elements of Soviet influence are being exploited by U.S. Air Force mentors, Afghan instructors and their Afghan students, many of whom are older pilots who were forced to flee when the Russian-backed Communist regime collapsed in the early 1990s. Many of these pilots kept flying—some for warlords who control vast swaths of the countryside, some for the Northern Alliance and some even for the Taliban.

The classrooms in the refurbished buildings, which DTI toured last month with USAF Lt. Col. Bill Shedd, commander of the 738th Air Expeditionary Advisory Sqdn., are part of the Kabul Air Corps training center that instructs Afghan crew chiefs, firefighters and maintenance crews, and teaches English and computer skills to Afghan crews operating the fleet of Russian-made Antonov An-26/32 fixed-wing cargo transports, Mi-17 cargo helicopters and Mi-35 attack helicopters.

Afghan civilian instructors teach most classes, with assistance from Americans. Shedd says the use of Afghan instructors is crucial. “We’ve got to make sure that Afghans are involved and doing this. If we don’t teach the Afghans or encourage them, it defeats the purpose. The Afghan process might work on a different time line, and the process is a little painful, but they know how to” procure the necessary equipment for the school.

Across the runway is a tidy campus of new barracks, a mess hall and Air Corps headquarters, all smartly done up in stone, plaster and glass, aligned neatly along newly paved streets. One of the buildings even houses a new simulator on which the 37 Afghan Mi-17 pilots train, although it is only open a few hours a day. USAF Lt. Col. James Dubin says “we’re looking at keeping the simulator open 16-18 hr. a day, but we need more operators to keep it rolling.”

It’s a message heard every day from almost every U.S. officer in Afghanistan: More could be done, if assets were in place. Moving around the country for a few weeks, the lack of just about everything—from manpower and air assets to the odd rules of engagement that restrict the use of air power under ever-changing and often toothless guidelines—brings the confused state of the war effort here into focus..

...the rest is over at DTI

Questions Surround the Ground Combat Vehicle

This past week, colleague Bettina Chavanne and I had the chance to sit down with Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, (ARCIC) at the AUSA convention in Washington to talk about Army modernization efforts in general, and the Army’s tactical ground vehicle strategy in particular. Bettina pressed the general on the feasibility of getting the Ground Combat Vehicle—the Army’s second shot at designing the tactical vehicle of its future, after the FCS version was scrapped by Secretary Gates earlier this year—up to prototype level by 2015 and in production by 2017, given that the Army doesn’t even know if its going to be wheeled or tracked yet.

Vane pointed to the rapid acquisition of the MRAP, saying that “we did MRAP faster than five years, we did Stryker faster than five years, we’re doing MATV faster than five years. Can we do GCV faster than five years? We can. Will we? That’ll be the 100 million question of the day.”

Of course, it deserves pointing out that the MRAP and MATV are essentially heavily armored shells that don’t have anything close to the communications network needs or the power generation needs that the Ground Combat Vehicle is slated to have. So the comparison on that level is a little strained. But there’s more. Gen. Vane mentioned that no decision has been made as to whether or not to make the GCV a wheeled or tracked vehicle—or both, given the different variants it is slated to have—which brings up the issue of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (ECV) as a model for the GCV. As we wrote earlier this week,

The U.S. Army will not rule out any option for its new ground combat vehicle (GCV) program, including wheeled and tracked variants, which could possibly lead to the service examining the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV).

The Marines have been an integral part of the Army task force on ground vehicles since the beginning, said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, or ARCIC. “We are very close in talking about capabilities and [which of those] are necessary for the GCV,” he said.

On Oct. 5, the Army submitted its Initial Capabilities Document to the joint staff, with five primary requirements for its new vehicle program: force protection, mobility, lethality, survivability and the network. The mobility piece could point to the possibility of using EFV as an Army combat vehicle.

Above a certain weight, mobility is hampered, no matter how nimble the wheeled vehicle is, Vane said. “There will be a weight inflection point that will then require a tracked vehicle.” The Army is looking at multiple variants of a GCV, he added. “Some could be tracked, some could be wheeled.”

“If the EFV can compete, bring it on,” he said. The EFV has had its share of problems, and seems to surprise budget watchers each time it makes it through the budgetary process unscathed. It’s no surprise that the Army is publicly keeping its options open, but with five years to go before a fleet of prototype vehicles that currently exist only in the imaginations of Pentagons planners are set to hit the test track, answers are going to have to start coming sooner rather than later.