Quick Link: "A Ghost in Kandahar"

MK sent the Ink Spots crew this link today about the challenges of working with the ANP in Kandahar. The blog post goes with this story. The story describes a recent operation there and how it worked because not many civilians were killed but wasn't very effective because it didn't really get rid of the Taliban, it just pushed them underground.

I thought both made for an interesting read. Any other stories out there like the one from the "At War" blog?

France to spend 300 Million Euros on training 12K African troops for peacekeeping (UPDATED)

At the 25th France-Africa summit, President Sarkozy announced that France would spend 300 million Euros to train 12,000 African troops for deployment to peacekeeping operations in Africa. He said the training would occur between now and 2012. Sorry all the links are in French--if you find something in English, I can update up here if you put it in the comments.

Now you might remember that back in 2004, at the G8 summit, the US had announced that it would train 75,000 peacekeepers, mostly from Africa, by 2010. GPOI (the Global Peace Operations Initiative), was supposed to be a G8 initiative and France and the UK had promised to help. As far as I know, that hadn't happened until now. Anyway, for the US, GPOI ended up costing about 90 million per year (if you want a breakdown on the numbers, Nina Serafino, from the Congressional Research Service has a nice chart here).

A couple questions: how does 300 million only pay for 12,000 troops to be trained--this seems way more expensive that US efforts (and don't get me started on how little the State Department knows about how well the training works or not)? Does anyone know how the training will be different? Does France plan on giving these troops a LOT more stuff than the US hands out as part of its own effort? Does that number include actually paying for these soldiers to fly to places and set up bases etc?

I understand that France sees providing this training as a way to decrease its own role in peacekeeping in Africa (which with ongoing withdrawal from Chad/CAR and a much small presence in Ivory Coast is already down a lot). Sarkozy also said the troops could help combat piracy (though how 300M gets you anywhere in terms of naval capacity I'm not sure). Anyway, given France's need for decreasing its deficit (and bailing out Greece...) what does this look like to all of you?

UPDATE: Gulliver reminds me that GPOI was renewed for another five years and that the initial effort exceeded the 75K goals and reached 85K instead. Friends at GAO who work on GPOI point out that GPOI hasn't been able to figure out how much impact the training has had on the performance of deployed troops.

From the Department of Incredibly Misleading Headlines

Yesterday I saw the following headline show up in a number of places on Twitter:

Gates Orders Services To Adopt McChrystal's COIN Standards

Sounds like a big deal, right? So I click the link and head on over to Defense News, expecting to read something revolutionary about how GEN McChrystal's counterinsurgency guidance had inspired a Department-wide review of doctrine and TTPs, or something.

Well, turns out that's not what this is. I wasn't even going to comment on the whole thing until this morning, when I saw the same headline linked at SWJ and on a number of other blogs.

Here's the first couple of paragraphs of the article running under that headline:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has directed the U.S. military services to adopt a set of counterinsurgency tools modeled after ones instituted in Afghanistan by Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said a senior Pentagon official.

Gates on May 24 signed a directive ordering the services to "take McChrystal's COIN training and proficiency standards ... and adapt those for the whole force," Garry Reid, deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and combat
terrorism, told Defense News May 25.

The idea is to take the kinds of COIN training and "proficiency" standards that McChrystal, the top American general in Afghanistan, implemented there with his "AfPak Hands" program.

Then later, this:

Gates wants the new military-wide training and proficiency standards to be "in line" with those used in McChrystal's "Hands" program, Reid said.

"Every service member needs some understanding" of the local population, culture and language "when they're going to be on the ground," he said during prepared remarks at an industry conference in Arlington, Va.

The memo instructs the Pentagon's top policy shop in coming months to develop the framework for the standards. It will then be up to the services, Joint Staff and other military components "to fill those out - as they would with anything else," Reid said.

So really what we're talking about here is this: the SECDEF wants to take the metrics by which we measure the language and cultural skills of AfPak Hands personnel and extend them across the whole Department, meaning that the folks in that program won't be the only ones headed downrange who are trained to be sensitive to the "human terrain."

It's difficult to understand why you'd call these "McChrystal's COIN standards;" while the sorts of skills that AfPak Hands' training program is focused on are obviously relevant to personnel operating in the COIN environment in Afghanistan, that phrase clearly evokes the ROE/SOP direction published by McChrystal under the title "ISAF Commander's Counterinsurgency Guidance." It seems clear that the publication wasn't trying to be sensationalist or anything -- the writer was just relaying the poorly-articulated, second-hand message of DASD Reid and elected to stay consistent with Reid's confusing word choice.

This isn't exactly a non-story -- the fact that AfPak Hands' metrics are considered meaningful and useful enough to be extended across the services is worthy of mention -- but I think a lot of people are reading this headline and getting the wrong idea.

Schmedlap is dominating right now

He's back from his hiatus and just absolutely killing some important stuff about the way we conceptualize and approach training for modern war, especially here and here. Go read.

Are We Still Talking About This?

Reading through yet another rehash of COIN vs. conventional over at AM (I'd specify a post, but the comments on every post have been going down this road), I've been thinking about what a future force structure would look like. I would like to think that most readers of this blog realize that both COIN and conventional doctrine will be part of the tool kit that DoD brings to the table to meet the needs of the nation's strategic interests (however that may be defined - if it ever really will be defined). I'm prone to believe that most operations would follow somewhere along the lines of Frank Hoffman's ideas of "hybrid warfare," where most operations would contain elements of both and that we'll have few conflicts that are purely one or the other. You know, like Iraq and Afghanistan should have been if they had been properly planned from the beginning.

If this ends up being DoD's direction, to prepare for hybrid warfare, then I doubt there will be any major changes to the force as it stands now and that we will rely on general purpose forces (GPF). Sorry Dr. Krepinevich. This begs the question of how you train this force to be able to execute both doctrines nearly simultaneously.

In execution, the doctrines aren't so divergent. In my experience (let's emphasize that, since many other vets may have other experiences), we were able to adequately train both between deployments. This probably falls into the "war is war" discussion. At one point though, my brigade was fortunate to be tapped for both an NTC and a JRTC rotation during our 16 months between deployments in order to train HIC and COIN (as we understood it then). Thankfully, we were the only lucky brigade to do this. Since then, Training Center rotations have been almost exclusively focused on COIN and MOUT.

But why can't you train both doctrines in one rotation? Why can't you leave the towns in the Southern and Central Corridors during the HIC phase of a rotation in the box? Make the commander figure out how to deal with that stuff when he's trying to fight an armored fight. You know, like during the invasion of Iraq. The scenarios could be set to have a high intensity focus followed by reconstruction. I don't understand why it has to be an either/or. That and it more realistically portrays actual conflicts.

All this rambling is to say, could we please, for the love of all that is holy, stop arguing like it has to be one way or another. The argument that "COIN is the answer to all of our prayers" or that "COIN is a baseless canard" doesn't do anyone any good. Population- verus enemy-centric COIN, GPF versus Advisory Corps, NTC needs to train this or that but not the other, etc. The world is much more complicated than that. Shouldn't our doctrine allow us to respond to that complexity? Without diluting abilities purely in the interest of consensus, a step back and some deep thinking could probably help us a lot more.