I enjoyed Rajiv's book
Imperial Life in the Emerald City, about his time in the Green Zone in Baghdad...that being said,
Great quotes from the article:
Quote:
“We have been obsessed with quantity over quality,” said a Special Forces major who worked alongside Afghan soldiers for a year. “You can only build so many troops to a certain standard. At some point — and we’re long past that — you get to diminishing returns.”
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Duh...
Quote:
“Those forces have taken the lead to very complex combat operations, and they are suffering the vast majority of coalition casualties, a further sign that the Afghans have the willingness to sacrifice and take the fight to the enemy,” Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said this month."
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Or, due to their current low levels of training, pervasive corruption, abject apathy, risk aversion, minimal operational capabilities and capacity, and a barely functioning logistical system, they are more prone to get themselves into shitty situations and more apt to get their ass handed to them when they do...
Quote:
"Even then, there are no plans to ease up on recruitment. High rates of desertion and low rates of reenlistment mean the army needs to replace about a third of its force each year."
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Exactly. A 300,000+ ANSF is unsustainable...this is the same thing I saw in 2010 when they were trying to give the ANCOP to SOF, because of serious systemic issues and training shortfalls in that formation ...when asked for my opinion, I told senior SOF leadership that it wasn't SOF's job to fix every broken toy or good idea gone bad in Afghanistan and that our efforts would be better suited to be focused elsewhere...
Quote:
"To some senior U.S. officers, the decision to expand the force so rapidly seemed like a mistake. “It was irresponsible,” said a general who had been involved in training efforts earlier in the war. “Afghanistan isn’t the sort of place where you can triple your inputs and expect three times the results.”
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And you would be hard-pressed to find any star-level officer that grabbed his stones and spoke out against this idiocy...please see:
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/05/2635198
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...ailure/309148/
Quote:
"The need to expand the force rapidly meant jettisoning other long-held tenets of security force development: small group instruction, careful vetting to weed out infiltrators, and restrictions on creating systems and structures that cannot be sustained once foreign advisers leave."
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Exactly...you can give them all the "sharks with laser beams" and gee-whiz equipment that you want, but as soon as we leave and that shit starts breaking and proves to be absolutely logistically unsustainable, the ANSF will implode...
Lord of the Flies anyone?
Quote:
"Advocates of the 352,000 goal argue that slowing training or building a smaller force would have ceded valuable ground to the Taliban. “You have to start with a higher number of less-well-trained troops just to plug the hole in the dike,” said Mark Jacobson, a former top civilian adviser to McChrystal. “By the time you get those better-trained troops, it’s already over.”
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Or everybody could have quit lying to each other at Star Fleet HQ and admitted to the President/Congress/SecDef/each other, that there was no way to unfuck Afghanistan on a self-imposed 2014 timeline and that there was going to be a need to keep "surge" forces on the ground for a longer period of time to give the ANSF some time to get their shit together...but that opens up another can of worms...