Tech Sgt. Matt Wright, a C-130 loadmaster, catches what is left of a parachute after a load was dropped from their plane over Aberdeen during a training mission at Warfield Air National Guard base.

We have focused on logistical supply routes to Afghanistan, from India over Kashmir to Kabul (by air) and through Georgia and Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan over land and the Caspian Sea.  Friend of The Captain’s Journal David Wood of the Baltimore Sun has an article on logistics within Afghanistan.

Maryland Air National Guard cargo crews are prepping for an expected deployment to Afghanistan next year, flying a critical mission of air-dropping supplies to U.S. troops fighting in remote locations.

Delivering ammunition, rations and water by parachute from the Guard’s C-130J cargo planes is increasingly necessary in Afghanistan, not just because troops are being scattered to small, local bases as part of a new strategy, but also because of the growing danger that ground convoys will be attacked by Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officers said. The more cargo that goes by air, the less risk to soldiers on convoys.

“We’re saving soldiers’ lives,” said Lt. Col. Mike Mentges, a Maryland Air National Guard pilot who flew missions there last year.

To make drops from altitudes ranging from 700 to 25,000 feet, a C-130 lowers its rear ramp, pitches its nose up sharply and unleashes up to a ton of cargo packed in pallets that float down under parachute canopies.

Under extreme conditions such as bad weather or a firefight raging in the drop zone, the Guard can rig a pallet with a satellite location receiver and a steerable parachute, and the cargo will maneuver itself to precise coordinates as much as 10 miles away …

American commanders are trying to avoid the fate of Russia’s Red Army, which was defeated in 10 years of combat in Afghanistan in part because it couldn’t easily resupply its ground forces. Struggling to force their way through insurgent ambushes, improvised explosive devices and land mines, the Russians lost 11,389 trucks, 2,452 armored personnel carriers and command vehicles, and 147 tanks, according to a 1995 U.S. Army study.

The Marines have a fairly audacious plan to use UAVs to resupply their troops.

By this summer, combat troops in Afghanistan could be getting re-supplied by giant unmanned aerial vehicles, a Marine Corps general told Congress Wednesday.

The Marines are working with industry to build a cargo-carrying UAV capable of hauling up to 1,200 pounds of battlefield essentials — such as ammunition, water and batteries — to ground troops in remote places, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. John Amos told the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on defense.

The move is part of a short-term plan to find new ways to reduce the weight Marines carry into combat. Details are sketchy, but Amos said “I’m looking for something now. We want to get a solution into Afghanistan by this summer.”

This kind of out-of-the-box thinking is valuable because logistics is so much more difficult than it was in Iraq.  But sooner or later, the roads must be controlled, the physical terrain must be won, and the population must be secured.  This kind of air supply must be considered to be a temporary measure to be replaced upon increased force projection and success in counterinsurgency.  Two years from now if we are still relying on air logistics to the same extent in Afghanistan, the campaign will have been lost.

The Captain’s Journal is proud to be the most up-to-date and comprehensive clearinghouse for current information and analysis on military logistics anywhere.

The Captain’s Journal had decided to wait before weighing in on the appointment of General Eric Shinseki to head Veteran’s Affairs.  We’re glad we did.

Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance, but was told by lawmakers that it would be “dead on arrival” if sent to Congress.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray used that blunt terminology, telling Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. She made the remarks during a Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs hearing about the 2010 budget.

No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama opposing the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration. The groups also noticed an increase in “third-party collections” estimated in the 2010 budget proposal—something they said could only be achieved if the VA started billing for service-related injuries.

Asked about the proposal, Shinseki said it was under “consideration.”

“A final decision hasn’t been made yet,” he said.

A second senator, North Carolina Republican Richard Burr, said he agreed that the idea should not go forward.

“I think you will give that up” as a revenue stream, if it is included in this April’s budget, Burr said.

Sen. Murray said she’d already discussed her concerns with the secretary the previous week.

“I believe that veterans with service-connected injuries have already paid by putting their lives on the line,” Murray said in her remarks. “I don’t think we should nickel and dime them for their care.”

Eleven of the most prominent veterans organizations have been lobbying Congress to oppose the idea. In the letter sent last week to President Barack Obama, the veterans groups warned that the idea “is wholly unacceptable and a total abrogation of our government’s moral and legal responsbility (sic) to the men and women who have sacrificed so much.”

The groups included The American Legion, Disabled American Veterans, Military Order of the Purple Heart, Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

At the time, a White House spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the option was being considere (sic).

Carefully consider what is happening here.  Even if this move is fashioned as companies paying their fair share, it is still a dark, sinister and sinful plan.  We are left without much to go on with the paucity of facts in the report above.  But let’s assume the best – that veterans still get treatment in full, paid for by the VA, unless they happen to work for a company with insurance who covers injuries to veterans (without considering them a so-called pre-existing condition).

The problem here is that if company A doesn’t hire injured veterans, and company B does and also happens to have an insurance benefit, then company B is penalized.  They are essentially taxed for having veterans under their employ.  The economy is not a perpetual motion machine, or another way of saying it is that money doesn’t grow on trees, unless you work for the U.S. Treasury.

Medical insurance means that everyone contributes out of his or her paycheck towards the health of everyone.  This cushion means that the company which hires any veteran who needs medical treatment (versus the company which doesn’t) is actually financially worse off because of it, especially small companies.  Now for the problem.  This is a disincentive for hiring veterans.

This scenario above is the best of all possible worlds, i.e., that all veterans are still covered for medical treatment in full.  According to the information above, this simply isn’t so, and veterans might have to pay out of pocket for their treatment.

Many veterans come home and continue to fight for all they are worth to keep from dying, and then to live with their injuries and disabilities.  They never leave the battle space.

So now Eric Shinseki must sit and ask himself what happened to his soul that he could abandon his fellow warriors on the field of battle like he has done, trying to save a few dollars while schemes are concocted to throw that very money away into useless programs.  And then when he finally determines how he lost his soul, perhaps he will have enough of one left to feel the shame that will always be his for the rest of his life.

Ever since The Captain’s Journal warned a year ago that logistical lines through Khyber would be targeted as part of the Taliban campaign, we’ve covered and analyzed the progress (or lack thereof) in developing new lines of supply.

There have been occasional problems further South in Pakistan, and while a smaller percentage of supplies goes to Kandahar from the port city of Karachi than through Khyber to Kabul, this recent attack may mark the beginning of a new phase of the Taliban campaign to interdict supplies in the South.

Gunmen in Pakistan on Tuesday torched a truck carrying supplies for NATO forces in neighbouring Afghanistan, leaving its driver and a helper wounded, police said.

Gunmen snatched the truck in Baluchistan province’s Soorab, 200 kilometres (120 miles) south of Quetta, and set it ablaze after wounding the driver and his helper, senior police official Khaild Baqi told AFP.

“The injuries to the driver were serious, but his helper’s condition is stable,” Baqi said.

Police chased the attackers and traded fire with them, but the search for them was continuing, he added.

Baqi said some 150 truckers parked their vehicles to protest against the attack but that the authorities were negotiating to persuade them to continue their journeys.

NATO and US-led forces in landlocked Afghanistan are hugely dependent on Pakistan for supplies and equipment, around 80 percent of which is transported through Pakistan.

Nobody claimed the responsibility for the attack.

Baluchistan has been rocked by a four-year insurgency waged by tribal rebels fighting for political autonomy and a greater share of profits from the region’s natural resources.

The province has also been hit by attacks blamed on Taliban militants.

On the other hand it may be the local insurgency rather than the Taliban, although Karachi already has elements of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, and Quetta is the home of the senior leadership of the Afghanistan Taliban.  Either way, this is not a good sign.

In other news, it appears that someone has been reading The Captain’s Journal.

US military officials have held talks with government and business representatives from Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan on the transport of supplies to Afghanistan, the US embassy in Baku said Tuesday.

The two days of talks in Baku, which concluded Tuesday, were aimed to “coordinate transportation issues that will facilitate the shipment of supplies to US, NATO and partner military forces operating in Afghanistan” through the Caucasus region, the embassy said in a statement.

It noted that the talks focused on “non-lethal supplies” and that “no military personnel are involved in the actual transportation of supplies through the Caucasus.”

The Asia Times recently summarized why we have been opposed to supply routes that go through and/or rely on Russia.

Moscow has every reason to encourage NATO to become more and more dependent on the northern corridor … a Russia-Iran understanding over the Afghan transit routes enables Moscow to exploit NATO’s dependence on the northern corridor, which, in turn, compels the alliance to be sensitive about Russia’s security interests and concerns and at the same time paves the way for Russia to play a bigger role in the stabilization of Afghanistan, which of course suits Iran.

Nothing good comes from the logistical transit routes through Russia.  To be clear, we had recommended approximately two months ago that the U.S. work harder on the Caucasus route, which is as follows.  First, supplies (including military supplies) would be shipped through the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosporus Strait in Turkey.  And from there into the Black Sea.  From the Black Sea the supplies would go through Georgia to neighboring Azerbaijan.

From here the supplies would transit across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, and from there South to Afghanistan.  A larger regional map gives a better idea of the general flow path.

The problems are numerous, including the fact that the supplies would be unloaded in Georgia to transit by rail car or road, unloaded from rail or truck to transit again by sea, and finally loaded aboard rail cars or trucks again (after passage across the Caspian Sea) in Turkmenistan to make passage to Afghanistan.

But removal of the logistical lines from Russian control places Iran, the missile shield, and NATO membership for Georgia and the Ukraine back on the table while we still supply our troops in Afghanistan with ordnance and supplies.  The U.S. is not “over a barrel,” so to speak.  And the DoD and State Department should keep reading The Captain’s Journal.

Category: Logistics

The New York Times published an article concerning temporarily halting SOF raids in Afghanistan.

The commander of a secretive branch of America’s Special Operations forces last month ordered a halt to most commando missions in Afghanistan, reflecting a growing concern that civilian deaths caused by American firepower are jeopardizing broader goals there.

The halt, which lasted about two weeks, came after a series of nighttime raids by Special Operations troops in recent months killed women and children, and after months of mounting outrage in Afghanistan about civilians killed in air and ground strikes. The order covered all commando missions except those against the highest-ranking leaders of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, military officials said.

American commanders in Afghanistan rely on the commando units to carry out some of the most delicate operations against militant leaders, and the missions of the Army’s Delta Force and classified Navy Seals units are never publicly acknowledged. But the units sometimes carry out dozens of operations each week, so any decision to halt their missions is a sign of just how worried military officials are that the fallout from civilian casualties is putting in peril the overall American mission in Afghanistan, including an effort to drain the Taliban of popular support.

Andrew Exum got to this one before we did, perhaps partially because he is now being paid to blog a certain portion of his time at CNAS.  Maybe Nagl could throw a few dollars our direction and we can blog more.  At any rate and on a serious note, what Exum says is worth hearing concerning his position that the line between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency is a false one.

I asked a highly respected retired U.S. Army general a year ago what the appropriate role for direct action special operations forces was in a population-centric COIN campaign. His answer was that direct action SOF is highly valuable because “it’s the way you play offense.” At the same time, though, it absolutely has to be tied into a greater COIN strategy. The cool kids cannot be allowed to just run amok, no matter how much they may want to.

Oh good heavens!  “… The way you play offense.”  Regular readers of The Captain’s Journal know how we approach the issue of SOF after having read:

The Cult of Special Forces

And perhaps it’s true that we are biased towards a certain position given that this is a Marine blog (and please don’t drop comments or send notes saying that there is such a thing as MARSOC now).  But still, there is a certain adolescent obsession with SOF being supermen that permeates this discussion and many like it.

SOF are not supermen.  They are (or should be, or started out) as soldiers with specialized billets.  Language, training, and cultural knowledge not typically found in the balance of the Army or Corps should mark SOF.  For SEALs, they must do things that require specialized training, such as underwater demolition requiring use of the closed circuit oxygen system rebreather, and so on.  Airmen who use satellite uplink equipment need specialized training.

To pretend that kinetics is performed by SOF while the “big Army” does something else is both elitist and insulting.  It is insulting to infantry because it says to them that they aren’t really qualified to perform kinetic operations.  But if reality is a gauge, squad rushes, satellite patrols, fire and maneuver tactics, stacks and room clearing operations, raids, use of night vision equipment, fast roping, and so on, are all things that infantry both trains on and has conducted in Iraq for years.  These are infantry specialties, and SOF cannot and should not lay sole claim to them.  As for that matter, flag and field grade officers who coddle this notion aren’t helping matters with the big Army.

Perhaps the supporters of this myth of the SOF superman are considering reality when recalling what is beginning to be the stark differences between Army basic training and Marine boot camp.  From Thomas Ricks Making the Corps:

Army basic training is intentionally ‘user friendly’. All units at Fort Jackson, which trains support personnel – clerks, cooks, truck drivers, nurses and mechanics – are gender integrated. Men and women sleep in separate barracks, but do everything else together … the rifle ranges at Fort Jackson are named after states, not great battles. There is no shock theatre ‘pick up’. “We do not try to intimidate,” explains Lt. Col. Mark G. McCauley, Commander of the receiving area. “We do not try to strike fear in their hearts. We conduct the handoff in a calm, quiet, professional way. We want the soldiers in training to have a sense of comfort.”

‘Fun’ isn’t a word one hears on Parris Island. Here it comes naturally to the lips of trainees. “They teach us, but they also make it fun,” says Eric Escamilla, a soldier-in-training from Lubbock, Texas. Spec. Sheila Suess, his comrade in Delta Company, agrees as they eat breakfast in their mess hall. At other tables, trainees chat in conversations. No drill instructors hover, and there is no shouting anywhere in the building …

Out on the bayonet assault course, Alpha Company of the Third Battalion, 13th Infantry Regiment, is going through the paces. The platoon sergeant – the Army equivalent of senior drill instructor – addresses them. “Soldiers, please be interested in what I have to say,” begins Staff Sgt. Ron Doiron. “This is the only time in your military career you get to do the bayonet assault course. Make the most of it. Let’s have some fun out here” … Alpha Company takes off through the piney woods, climbing over low obstacles, sticking the tires and rubber dummies with bayonets. Jumping down into a trench, Pvt. Tralena Wolfe’s knee pops. She comes off the course, sits on a log, and cries.

As for a more timely assessment, you may go to the Army Times where Marine Captain Josh Gibbs discussed his trip to Fort Jackson.  Perhaps the Army is being used as a social engineering experiment, which would explain the interest that the Democrats normally take in increasing the size of SOF.  Only the champions of SOF can completely explain why they advocate seeing kinetics as the primary domain of SOF with [who knows what] the domain of the infantry.

But without such an explanation and justification, the following objections should suffice at the moment.

• The model of SOF as supermen who perform raids continues the diminution of infantry, just as it has done with the Australian infantry (see We Were Soldiers Once: The Decline of the Royal Australian Infantry Corps?).
• This model limits the kinetic power of the Army by restricting it to a small portion of the Army.
• This model allows the politicians to use the Army as fertile ground for social engineering experiments.  The Marines still don’t allow women in combat, at least partially because of the statistically higher propensity for lower extremity injuries and reduced strength.
• This model is more expensive than simply requiring the infantry to perform its designated role.
• This model actually makes SOF less special, in that their normal focus on training, language and culture is replaced with more kinetics.

Now, as for counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency, regular readers know that we are nonplussed and unimpressed with the cloak and dagger missile strikes in Pakistan, and dark of the night raids in Afghanistan.  These people show up, shoot up a place, perhaps take some people, go, and the next day are not heard from or seen.  No one knows who the hell these people were, where they came from or why they were here.  All people know is that they brought violence to their community.  This is no way to win friends or influence people.

The Marine Corps infantry model is different.  In operations in the Helmand Province, the Marines were described at times as being in “full bore reloading” mode.  Over 400 hard core Taliban fighters were killed in and around Garmser.  But then they didn’t leave.  They sat with laptop PCs running EXCEL, logged and computed the losses and local worth of all of the things destroyed, and then paid cash to the people of Garmser.

Cash, all nicely set out in a tent, with carpeted entrance, inviting the tribal elders and heads of household to come in and collect the money for the broken windows, doors, etc.  Then the Marines supplied security to the area to keep the Taliban out.  Sure, the 24th MEU had to leave and unfortunately, the British apparently could not hold the terrain.

But this serves as a picture of how it’s done.  Exum is smart enough to know this.  Killing high value targets, according to our contacts, has led to the vicious cycle where Taliban operations stand down for a couple of weeks for them to sort out who their next mid-level commander is, several weeks or months of Taliban violence after they do, then raids take this man out, and so on the stupid procedure goes.  The procedure is a loser.

So why did the SOF command stop the raids for a couple of weeks?  What will they do after a couple of weeks?  Will the raids start over?  If so, why did they stop?  There isn’t anything wrong with raids as long as it is against the right targets, but expecting them all to be done by SOF without the presence there the next morning is absurd strategy.  It may make for good movies and cloak and dagger talk about who Exum calls the “cool kids,” but it makes for a bad campaign.

In the end, there is a stark difference between counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.  One is performed by police, U.S., Interpol, and so forth, through banking, intelligence agencies, and diplomatic contacts.  The other is performed by the Army and Marine Corps infantry.  Or at least, it is by the Marines, and should be by the Army.

**** UPDATE ****

Michael Yon posts a provocative piece today concerning a number of things, including whether we will abandon Iraq, but also including his current take on Afghanistan and training of the Afghan Army.  Please read the entire piece, but take particular note of this one paragraph.

I’ve asked many key officers why we are not using our Special Forces (specifically Green Berets) in a more robust fashion to train Afghan forces.  The stock answers coming from the Green Beret world – from ranking officers anyway – is that they are taking a serious role in training Afghan forces.  But the words are inconsistent with my observations.  The reality is that the Green Berets – the only outfit in the U.S. military who are so excellently suited to put the Afghan army into hyperdrive – are mostly operating with small groups of Afghans doing what appears to be Colorado mule deer hunts in the mountains of Afghanistan.  Special Forces A-teams are particularly well suited to train large numbers of people, but are not doing so.

Ahem, like I was saying …

Early on there were a number of theories about who sponsored and executed the attack on the Sri Lanka Cricket team in Lahore, Pakistan, on March 3.  But the theories seem to be converging on a single suspect.  The Asia Times reported on March 5 that the attack was was “carried out by disgruntled Punjabi militants seeking to extract concessions from the government … [who were] working directly under the command of a joint Punjabi and Kashmiri leadership based in the North Waziristan tribal area and allied with al-Qaeda.”  Syed Saleem Shahzad goes on to explain the theory.

Before the Swat agreement was inked, the Pakistani Taliban presented their demands. These included a financial package worth 480 million rupees (US$6 million) for compensation for families that had lost members through death or injury or which had lost property as a result of the operations of the security forces. They also demanded the release of prisoners.

The government accepted all of the demands, but it refused to release those prisoners who were not from Swat. At the top of this list was Maulana Abdul Aziz, a radical cleric from the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad who was arrested in July 2007 while fleeing from the mosque after security forces stormed it. The government also refused to release several other militants, including a very important person, who were recently arrested in Islamabad.

The Punjabi militants were clearly upset at having their demands rejected, while the Pashtuns got what they wanted. The attack in Lahore was meant to redress the “injustice.”

Similarly, the Times reports that Pakistan’s investigation:

… showed that Tuesday’s attackers were from Punjab and North West Frontier Province, which has become the main battleground between militants and Pakistan’s armed forces.

Intelligence sources said that southern Punjab had become the main centre of radical Islamic activities in the country. Despite a ban, groups such as JeM and LeJ had expanded their influence in the area, drawing recruits from among rural poor, they said.

Most of the gunmen involved in the attack on Mumbai in November came from the same region.

JeM has become a virtual extension of al-Qaeda and was blamed for most of the terrorist attacks in Pakistan after the country become an ally in the US-led War on Terror in 2001.

LeJ is an extremist Sunni sectarian group whose members overlap with JeM. It has also been involved in al-Qaeda-led attacks in Pakistan.

But the reaction of some in Pakistan is both telling and important.  “Numerous Pakistani analysts have been quick to point a finger at India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) for staging what they say is a tit-for-tat attack on Tuesday, although there is been no official announcement in this connection … retired General Hamid Gul, who is a former head of the ISI, blame India’s RAW.”

Of course he does.  Even the Times notes this reaction.

As usual, the kneejerk reaction in Pakistan was to blame Indian intelligence for the attacks. But the authorities now privately admit that the attack was home-grown.

Do they really?  Should the Times have been so quick to exonerate Pakistani analysts?  An interesting and at times sardonic article entitled After the Taliban Air Force, Time to Battle the Taliban Navy from domain-b.com discusses the U.S.-to-Pakistan largesse and why it is being spent the way it is.

With the recent revelation that the US administration has instructed GE to defer plans to operationalise engines for an Indian Navy frigate programme, it is time to look at how it is proceeding with plans to arm the Pakistan Navy with equipment that can only be utilised against India, writes Rajiv Singh.

Members of the US Congress have been sniggering for years about the funds being allocated to arm the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) with cutting-edge technology to fight what they refer to as the ”Taliban Air Force.”  Their sarcasm is aimed, in particular, at the number of contracts awarded to upgrade Lockheed Martin’s Paki fighter- the F-16, which over the past decade of the Bush administration, has been equipped with the best, and most lethal, in sensors, munitions and equipment.

Of course, it is yet to participate in a single tactical operation against the Taliban, or any other entity.

For long, these funds have been allocated to Pakistan under the guise of helping it fight the Global War on Terror (GWOT). At one point of time questions began to be asked of the Bush administration if the contracts, funds and upgrades of the Paki F-16 were aimed only at shoring up Pakistani capabilities against India.

Now, with the great ”agent of change” occupying the White House, and the majority Democrats in the Congress in love with everything he wants to do, the time has come for Indian parliamentarians, at least, to take cognizance of the way the Pakistan Navy (PN) intends to take on the ”Taliban Navy.”

Sometime in February this year, the Pakistan Navy was provided the clearance to acquire three types of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) sonobuoys – totaling 445 units – under the Foreign Military Sales programme. This piece of anti-submarine warfare equipment is of the same class as contracted for the US Navy.

Indeed, the contract signed with suppliers is a joint contract for the US and the Pakistan Navy.

The sale was cleared, presumably, even as the Obama administration was instructing General Electric not to operationalise two new LM 2500 gas turbines it has contracted to supply the Indian Navy for its state-of-the-art, indigenously designed, Project 17 stealth frigates.

The first of three frigates, INS Shivalik, is ready to commence sea trials but the programme will now have to go on hold – at least for a few months –with the Obama administration reviewing its military relations with a number of countries, including India.

What are sonobuoys? These are devices meant to detect, and identify, submarines as they move about stealthily in shallow or deep waters.

The article goes on to conclude that “The right of a nation to arm itself is a sovereign one and no objections can be taken on that score. What we need to look at is the reason why the US is persisting with its cold war strategy of propping up Pakistan militarily against India.”

Authorities in Pakistan may “privately admit” to any number of things, but their actions belie their words.  If you want to know the importance the authorities in Pakistan place on things, follow the money.  Pakistan is hopelessly obsessed with its neighbor India, a country which poses no threat whatsoever if it senses that Pakistan poses no threat.

Pakistan is a failing state, and more troubling is the fact that it is a nuclear state.  But while Pakistan fails, its authorities fret and wring their hands over internal politics, India, largesse, and a whole host of things that are serving as nothing more than distraction from the real threat, Islamic extremism in the FATA and NWFP.  This extremism is moving relentlessly from the tribal areas to the urban population centers, even as far South as Karachi.