Sunday, October 2, 2011

Nation Bulding II: The Never-Victorious Army

My friend seydlitz recently posted an excerpt from an article in which a U.S. officer lauds the performance of the Afghan troops he has worked with."I watched them run toward the sound of gunfire..." he writes, ""...despite often having only a Vietnam-era flak vest or less to protect them. These men are Uzbeks, Hazaras, Tajiks and, increasingly, Pashtuns — former rivals now working together. They are the beginnings of a nation."And yet MAJ Lujan worries that his nation is going to abandon these hungry young soldiers; "Rather than resignation, America should show resolve...to empower those Afghans willing to lead and serve."

I don't want to use this post to take one side or another about whether the Afghan soldiers should or shouldn't get more or less support from the U.S. First, nothing I will say will have any affect one way of the other, and, second, I don't have anything near enough information about the Afghan troops involved or the tactical situation on the ground to be able to make an informed judgement about whether such U.S. investment will produce a commensurate return.

But one thing that DOES give me heartburn - and I do want to offer a comment about - is the question of how long it should and can take to create an army.One constant meme we U.S. citizens are fed is how long it takes for the training and equipping the U.S./NATO has been doing to take effect. Overall foreign forces have been in Afghanistan for a decade. Even discarding the first eight years - which, we are reminded, were the Afghan National Army's "lost decade-minus-two" - the intensified effort to create a viable fighting force has been going on for two years.

And at this point we are informed that a thundering two out of 180 maneuver battalions in the ANA are capable of combat without direct ISAF direction.

Only...they're sort of not. "Those two “independent” battalions still require U.S. support for their maintenance, logistics and medical systems,” LTG Caldwell (commander of the ISAF training command) admitted when Pentagon reporters pressed him on Monday morning. “Today, we haven’t developed their systems to enable them to do that yet,” Caldwell said.

Now that's fine. The ANA is having a tough time getting their shit together. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you, and sometimes the bear pulls your shirt over your hear, pulls your pants down and bloops you up the bunghole until the eyes pop out of your head. There are just days like that.

But can we fucking stop saying "Building up foreign armies isn’t easy."

It's not "easy". But it's not fucking rocket science, either. And because the Western publics now have very little experience with going through military training - and have NEVER had a decent grasp of history - they are inclined to believe this statement about how hard it is to build an Afghan Army and are nodding their heads rather than asking hard questions about what the hell is going on.

In fact, Western officers have relatively quickly built foreign levies into effective armies since Hernan Cortez drafted a bunch of Tlascalans to help him skin the Aztec Empire.

To take just one example. Back in 1860 the European powers were in a tight space in China. The Qing government was a shambles, and what may well have been the most terrible insurrection in history, the Taiping Rebellion, was rampaging all over the part of China that the Westerners were living in.

So a character named Frederick Townsend Ward - American sailor, filibusterer, mercenary, and general adventurer - doped up a bunch of ex-Taiping rebels and assorted random coolies into a European-style force that was eventually tagged with the awesome title "Ever-Victorious Army" by the Qings. Formed in 1861, three years later the little Army had a force of some 5,000 including infantry, artillery and even its own little brown-water Navy. Ward and his successor Charles "Chinese" Gordon, a British officer led the EVA into a series of beatings of the Taiping rebels, who were at that time the most formidable force in Qing China. The Qings rallied, the Rebellion fell apart, and the European powers continued their bitch-slapping of the Chinese "government" on their way to colonial sexy-time.

The thing is, the raw material for the EVA was no better, and probably worse, than the raw material for the ANA. And the resources Ward and Gordon had to make this rabble into a fighting force was certainly slimmer than that available to ISAF. And yet, in roughly a year - the EVA was beating the Taipings by 1862 - and certainly by two years this shake-and-bake Army was equal to or better than the toughest insurgent force in China.The ANA doesn't need to meet Manstein on the plains of the Ukraine, for cryin' out loud. They need to be able to execute the simplest Infantry 101 missions; security, cordon-and-search, movement to contact, combat and reconnaissance patrols. The Afghan peoples are among the fightingest on Earth, and the U.S. has organizations like the Special Forces that are supposed to be some of the finest trainers of foreign soldiers in the world.

So can we stop repeating how haaaaard it is to make an Army and, instead, start asking why is has taken so long to take a bunch of fierce fighters into...units that can fight fiercely?

Because every time we say it Fred Townsend and Charlie Gordon and the ghosts of the ex-coolies and peasants of the EVA flip us the bird in Hell.

23 comments:

  1. Not to be a wet blanket, but weren't the majority of officers in the EVA experienced European veterans?

    Not advisers like what we use, but Westerners actually in command of Chinese troops at both high and low levels? Kind of like what we did in Haiti and Nicaragua back 80 or 90 years ago.

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  2. ... and the Philippines?

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  3. the green berets asserted for decades that in the event of war, you send a squad into the mountains and half a year later you'd have a mountain tribesmen militia ready for action. I suspect that story won't be told very often in this decade.

    The ANA/ANP problem appears to be the infiltration by cronies and the desertion rate.
    The actual combat training can be accomplished in two weeks. The opponents don't appear to get much better training either.

    The common complaints about underdeveloped combat support (supply, medical) is ridiculous and shows that the Westerners want to to build an European-style army there. That's stupid. Just build a warlord's army that's loyal to the mayor of Kabul.

    Supply them with money for buying local food and supply them with a truckload of ammo once in a while. Medical support - require civilian medical personnel to care for soldiers. The country doesn't have enough doctors for civilians, why should it have dedicated doctors for soldiers?

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  4. "Just build a warlord's army that's loyal to the mayor of Kabul."

    :D Good luck with that!

    Trouble is, in a "sea" of Afghans, it's very hard to tell which little "fishie" is friendly and which is gonna bite your butt off.

    As we see in the news time and time and time again.

    bb

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  5. mike: From what I've read the MTO&E for the EVA called for its line battalions (which actually ranged from big companies of about 200 to genuine battalions of 600-650) to have 12 European officers and about 50 Chinese NCOs.

    My understanding is that the Europeans varied freakishly in quality from decent regimental types to mercs who remained drunk from first call to lights out. They certainly weren't the "best and the brightest".

    Sven: Yep.

    The thing is, I'm willing to buy the notion that it takes SOME time to build a decent fighting force, more to train the higher level commanders (company and above) than the troopies. But TWO FUCKING YEARS? C'mon!

    The U.S. Army built fighting division from raw draftees in less than two years, from the "School of the Platoon" to divisional maneuvers, to include the entire command and staff. And that was in order to conduct amphibious operations and high-intensity combat against one of the best tactical organizations in the world at the time.

    The notion that we're still teaching the ANA to spell "cat" seems more ridiculous to me every time I hear it, and I've been hearing if for...well, about two years now.

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  6. To all,
    As a SF officer i gotta say that in my old experiece that most, if not all, the new troopies in the ANA probably have a depth of combat experience BEFORE they sign up.
    This was true in the SCU-special commando units in Macvsog.
    To Al - pls note SCU-special commando. REF. a previous discussion on SAF.
    We in the USA used to have an Army to fight external threats ans coin is exactly the opposite. The Army is to suppress the citizenry, hence the problemo.
    jim

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  7. Chief,

    I think there is a difference here. For better or worse, we're trying to build a national Army which I think is quite a bit different than building some fighting units to go tear-assing through the countryside. I think the SF guys could do the latter pretty easily - after all they integrated well with the Northern Alliance formations and helped build up Pashtun units under Karzai and other leaders in 2001-2002 to overthrow the Taliban.

    Building such forces is usually temporary, though. Ward's "Ever Victorious Army" was built for a specific purpose and was disbanded after a few years. It was never expected to become an independent, self-sustaining force. In Afghanistan by contrast, what we're trying to do is build an institutional army that will be an enduring tool of the state, be subject to a national rule-of-law, etc.

    So I do agree that creating an army is relatively easy and it's something we could do but what we are trying to do is much more than that and is much more difficult. Building institutions that can endure on their own and that are loyal to the state is no easy task and I'm skeptical it's a goal we can actually achieve.

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  8. Andy-

    Would I be wrong in restating the gist of what you said as follows:

    We are using the US Army to train the Afghan Army to do something which the US Army is neither trained to do nor allowed by law (Posse Comitatus) to do. That is enforce domestic civil law.

    Just a thought.

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  9. Al,

    The Afghan Army is supposed to be the force that defeats insurgent forces and, once that's done, defend Afghan territory. They are not supposed to be a police force, that's what the ANP is for. I haven't looked at the details for a while though - maybe BG could add something here.

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  10. Andy,
    How do you differentiate between the ANA and the Natn'l police????
    They all look a lot alike to my observation.
    jim

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  11. Jim,

    Bureaucratically, they operate under different chains of command - the army is subordinate to the defense minister and the police are subordinate to the interior minister. This is important because the ministries are where the money is and it flows down largely through a system of patronage.

    More importantly, though, there is a lot of overlap in terms of missions. Normally a military is primarily focused on external security while the police are focused on internal security. In Afghanistan this is mashed up because in many ways the distinction between internal and external threats does not exist. The ANP, for example, is really a paramilitary police force that's technically in charge of regular policing, counter-narcotics, border security and counter-terrorism. It just so happens that those last three functions are part and parcel of the insurgency.

    So it is pretty confusing and the division of labor between the two isn't really clear, at least to me. That's about the extent of my knowledge of the details so I won't speculate further.

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  12. ANA or ANP, the thing that gives me the giggy about these "it's SO HARD to train the locals" stories is that the excuse is nearly always the same; "They're illiterate, they can't perform technical tasks, we're starting from below the bottom level competence..."

    But...the SF created some damn fine Mike Forces out of the Vietnamese Montagnard peoples, a group never known for book learning. And the peons that made up the VC weren't exactly Rhodes Scholars, either, but they kicked ass like crazy monkeys...history is full of effective fighting forces made up of some pretty primitive folks. Assuming you have a handful of local elites who CAN read and write, etc., you've got the makings of troop units.

    So it just seems like there's got to be something ELSE there, something that's making this whole process such a loss-leader, and what's frustrating to me is that all these stories do is just make it opaque in a different way.

    Do you suppose that the military highers and the people on Capitol Hill and the White House are getting the unpolished version? Or IS this the unvarnished truth...in which case, WTF, over?

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  13. "Building institutions that can endure on their own and that are loyal to the state is no easy task and I'm skeptical it's a goal we can actually achieve."

    Big, BIG check and rog on that, Andy!

    But the thing is that this article, and the others like it, keep harping not on the problems with nation-building - and there ARE a lot of other reports that stress the problems in A'stan with the latter - but the military-specific problems building troop units, the exact same thing that Ward & Co. did 100+ years ago.

    I'm with you on my skepticism that we can hammer the Afghans hard enough to make a viable nation-state there. But troop units? Christ, we at LEAST should be able to do that.

    And if not, then...WHY not? Like I said above, the "illiterate private" meme just doesn't sound right.

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  14. In my opinion, the problem is that these organizations are built on a fundamental lie. Everyone says "National Institutions" but they really are foreign controlled puppet institutions. Except that the foreigners are leaving soon (only the exact date hasn't been announced just yet).

    So, everyone just goes through the motions. People say what they are supposed to say and do what they are supposed to do, but nobody puts their soul into it because it will soon come apart anyways (and besides, they will be leaving before that happens either via rotation or desertion)

    Because there is no "myth" gluing the institution together, you end up with a organizational game of snakes and ladders.

    In the old days, they were "honest" imperials. A native enlistee could really believe that the foreigners were there to stay. You can build on this.

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  15. Oddly enough, I came up with a vaguely similar solution quite a while back.

    http://www.thinkdefence.co.uk/2011/07/what-is-a-global-guardian/

    It was roundly stomped on at the time, but I think it has real merit.

    As others have mentioned, where we are really struggling, isnt teaching people to shoot and move from cover to cover, most Afghans learnt to field strip a rifle before they were 10, its getting them to turn up for work every day, and stay at their post, even when its hot and theres little shade.

    I'd be very happy for any constructive feedback.

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  16. Unfortunately, what you proposed, TrT is simply a colonial army that ignores the sovereignty of Afghanistan, however chaotic or tenuous that sovereignty might be. Ain't gonna do anything more than fuel hostility towards the colonial power.

    Require a foreign language as part of building a foreign dominated domestic defense force? The sun began setting on the British Empire during WWII. Let's learn from that, not try to replicate it.

    From Organizational Behavior 101:

    In order to accomplish effective and lasting change, all four of the following conditions must be met:

    1. The people must know that change is necessary
    2. The people must know what change is necessary
    3. The people must possess the ability and tools to make the change
    4. The people must want or at least be willing to make the change.

    Failing any one of the above dooms an attempt at change to failure.

    Chief-

    It's not the US that is lacking in Afghanistan. It's the US's lack of acceptance that more than one of the necessities of change are missing. Hell, we could do an entire thread offering examples of where one, as well as all four elements are not present there. Thus, we are trying to teach a pig to sing.

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  17. TrT: "...turn up for work every day, and stay at their post, even when its hot and there's little shade."

    What you're describing isn't as much creating and anmy as changing a lifestyle. The problem there is, as Al points out, convincing the locals that they NEED to change. Frankly, if I was an Afghan, I'd question the wisdom of that sort of stuff, too. "Why do we sit here in the sun, ferenghi, when there is shade over there?"

    The alternative, though, is using them for what they're good at; irregular warfare.

    I suspect that part of this "it's so haaaaard to build and army" problem is the type of army we're trying to build, and that's a Western style, dress-right-dress, sit in the sun type army. You can do that, but, again, as Al points out, you need the patience, time, and, most importantly, ruthlessness of a colonial occupier.

    I don't see any of those on offer at the ISAF shop.

    Al: But you would think that we'd be able to see that the fucker will dig for truffles if we use its natural instincts. Which leads me to suspect that after ten years we're still convinced that we can turn the pig into a dog, or a housecat, or an endtable...or something. Which makes me wonder not so much as whether we can accept that we're missing something but, rather, whether our entire concept of what we're trying to do and how is still fundamentally flawed...

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  18. To all,
    We talk yaddi yaddi about the AFGH pOlice , but fail to always discuss the obvious. What good are police if the court system is a non entity?
    Aren't the 2 part of a package?
    When did we as a nation develope a national police force?
    jim

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  19. Chief,

    I suspect that part of this "it's so haaaaard to build and army" problem is the type of army we're trying to build, and that's a Western style, dress-right-dress, sit in the sun type army.

    That's kind of what I was trying to get at. It's one thing to build a small fighting unit with foreign leadership and support to go around the country-side kicking ass. It's quite another to build a professional NCO and officer corps and a large, national military force. Consider the differences between Ward's force and a national military force - they are pretty significant. There are a whole ton of stuff Ward's boys didn't need to worry about because they were too small or they were taken care of by the foreigner. Ward's force wasn't supposed to be a national, self-sustaining and enduring army and that's exactly what we're trying to do in Afghanistan.

    Jim,

    You're right about a court system. The Taliban have been quite effective at disrupting attempts to build a court system through targeted assassination. Judges and the like usually don't survive too long and then the Taliban will come in and settle disputes their way.

    BTW, this is a good piece by Michael Krepon. Well worth reading.

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  20. "That's kind of what I was trying to get at. It's one thing to build a small fighting unit with foreign leadership and support to go around the country-side kicking ass. It's quite another to build a professional NCO and officer corps and a large, national military force. Consider the differences between Ward's force and a national military force - they are pretty significant. There are a whole ton of stuff Ward's boys didn't need to worry about because they were too small or they were taken care of by the foreigner. Ward's force wasn't supposed to be a national, self-sustaining and enduring army and that's exactly what we're trying to do in Afghanistan."

    Except that we apparently aren't anywhere near building a national army (or the supporting infrastructure); we're at the point of having two functional battalions. Which still rely on the foreigners for support in most things.

    IOW, Ward did more in less time, with fewer resources.

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  21. Andy,
    i find it hard to blame the Taliban for a lack of a court system in AFGH.
    Have we acted lawfully in that country?
    Hint- UN report on torture. Yeah, i know it's enemy propaganda and we and the afgh don't torture.
    Will this ever end?
    jim

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