BY MICHAEL LARSON
Staff Sergeant Joseph Pratt arrived at Forward Operating Base Tiger in the middle of August 2005 for an inglorious assignment but one on which America’s exit strategy from Afghanistan hinged: for two weeks, he would train Afghan soldiers how to shoot straight. For the generals designing strategy, nothing could be more crucial: once the Afghan National Army (ANA) could perform, American troops could go home. For the soldiers of Chosen Company, however, the mission felt like something else – a vacation.
Over the previous six weeks Chosen Company, Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, had fought two ferocious battles in the Arghandab Valley, their tenth and eleventh major engagements since they had arrived in Afghanistan in April. The first fight had not gone well. During the assault one private had lost a good chunk of his thigh to the fin of a rocket-propelled grenade that had passed right between his legs. Another soldier was shot in the spine, rendering him a paraplegic. Two more soldiers sustained major wounds. The second battle had been a resounding success – twenty insurgent killed, no friendly wounded – but the men were worn down.
“A lot of the guys viewed training the ANA as R&R compared to where we had just come from,” Sergeant Pratt, a ten-year veteran infantryman from Oklahoma with the build of a rhino and enough intellect to have wooed a PhD wife, remembered. “That doesn’t mean they were happy with the mission. Infantrymen like to be in the fight.”
The Afghan soldiers that Sergeant Pratt’s squad was assigned to train were not new recruits. Rather they were members of an operational Afghan Army kandak, or battalion. The Americans instructed the Afghan soldiers in the basics of how to hit targets effectively at twenty-five meters. As Pratt soon found out, the skill level among the soldiers varied enormously.
“The older guys, they usually were decent enough shots. The younger guys were all over the place,” recalled Pratt. He remembered the first group of Afghans he cycled through the firing range. Some of the younger Afghan soldiers didn’t even know how to line up the iron sights on their AK-47s.
“You’d have these guys acting like as long as they pulled the trigger the bullet was going to hit the target,” Pratt said. “God would guide it. It was up to God.” It wasn’t uncommon for the wildest soldiers to miss by five meters, striking targets meant for soldiers far down the row. It took considerable patience on the part of Pratt and his men to teach them the proper method.
The training itself was run in an ad-hoc fashion and there was no formalized assessment system in place. “Teach them how to shoot. That’s what they told us,” Pratt recalled. He also learned during his stint at the range that most of the Afghan Army soldiers had received minimal training prior to being deployed to the field. Though Pratt said the American soldiers certainly still did their job, he admitted that many were simply “checking the box.”
The Afghan soldiers did marginally improve their marksmanship during the refresher training, but Pratt still felt like many were ill-prepared to fight the Taliban independently: “Without ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] assisting them, a lot of them would end up being stacked like cordwood.”
In December 2009 the Obama administration made training the Afghan National Security Forces one the central tenets of the new counterinsurgency strategy to be employed in the Afghan campaign. As part of this strategy, coalition forces would nearly double the size of the Afghan National Army to 171,600 by October 2011. The long-term goal was envisioned to be somewhere just short of a quarter million Afghan Army soldiers. This would return the AFGHAN ARMY to its pre-Soviet invasion size when levels never dropped below 200,000.
In theory, a larger Afghan Army coupled with a larger Afghan National Police (ANP) force would enable coalition forces to gradually transition to a support role as Afghan forces took primary responsibility both for protecting the populace and fighting the insurgency. Key to this strategy though was not only increasing the size of the Afghan National Security Forces but also improving the quality of the forces along the way. As Sergeant Pratt saw during his first Afghan deployment in 2005-06, the competency level of Afghan Army and police units varied significantly, with the vast majority of units falling low on the spectrum of competency, to speak nothing of self-sufficiency.
This dual mission – to increase the size of the security forces quickly while at the same time increasing quality – required the coalition training authority to rethink the training process.
“The nature of the task was inherently at cross-purposes,” said Andrew Exum, a Fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a former Army Ranger. “Normally when you boost output, quality has to suffer.”
The coalition training authority chose to focus its attention on the assessment system and number and quality of trainers. From 2007 to June 2010 the primary method used by NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan to assess Afghan Army readiness was the Capability Milestone (CM) system. This system was quantitative in nature and Afghan Army units were rated along a spectrum of one to four (one being able to conduct operations independently, four being reliant entirely upon coalition forces for assistance) based on how they scored in percentage terms on such things as logistics, personnel, and training. The scores in each individual category were then combined into an aggregate score which was supposed to give a general assessment of the unit’s readiness. This system was used at every level of training, from basic recruit training to unit level certification to operational unit evaluation.
“The biggest problem with the CM system,” Exum said, “was that most of the statistics measured inputs. But inputs don’t always guarantee outputs. Some statistics are useful, but other times you got to use qualitative judgment.” Exum described how many of the statistics used in the Capability Milestone system measured a unit’s preparedness, such as how many weapons it had been issued, how many personnel billets were unfilled. But these statistics did not necessarily translate to a unit’s performance in the field: just because a unit had been issued a certain number of weapons did not mean they could use them effectively. Additionally, unit trainers were incentivized to exaggerate a unit’s performance to show progress. The end result, according to the Inspector General’s June 2010 Quarterly audit, was a gross overestimation of most Afghan Army units’ readiness.
In June 2010 the Capability Milestone system was replaced with the Commander’s Unit Assessment Tool, a narrative-based assessment method that was more reliant on qualitative judgments by coalition trainers. Mid- and end-of-cycle testing was introduced to basic recruit training as well, a level of assessment that had formerly been missing.
The second major reform undertaken by the coalition training authority in December 2009 was boosting the number of coalition and Afghan trainers on all levels. In November 2009 individual Afghan Army recruits had a 79:1 instructor-to-student ratio. This ratio dropped to 29:1 by August 2010. At the same time a heavy emphasis was placed on “training the trainers”: the idea that coalition trainers needed to pass off day-to-day instruction and operations to their Afghan counterparts as soon as was practical, transitioning to a purely mentoring role. As with Afghan Army units in the field, it was this transition process that would theoretically enable the Afghan Army to be self-sufficient over the long term.
Sergeant Pratt returned to Afghanistan in February of 2010 as part of 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment. This time the unit’s sole mission was to train the Afghan National Army at various locations across the country. One of these locations was the regional training center at Camp Shaheen in Mazar-e-Sharif in the north. There First Lieutenant Brandon Vaitor played a lead role in Destroyer Company’s efforts to revamp an ineffective training system.
“I could see when we got there that we had our work cut out for us,” Lieutenant Vaitor said.
Morning muster provided an example of the training center’s shortcomings. Though tasked with assembling at 8 A.M., Afghan soldiers – both trainers and recruits – routinely filtered in as much as an hour late. It then took additional time before the new recruits actually assembled in any kind of orderly fashion. And in terms of appearance, the assembled soldiers hardly resembled a military unit. As Lieutenant Vaitor described it, “uniformity would have been out the window. Rather than all being in the same uniform, some would be in their PT [physical training] uniform, others their Battle Dress, others still in a third hodge-podge of both.” Vaitor remembered one Afghan recruit who arrived to an exercise session in shalwar pants, a camouflage tunic, a black Adidas warm-up jacket over the tunic, and fake Ray Ban sunglasses.
The regional training center concept had been first hatched in 2007 as a way to increase Afghan Army recruitment in areas far from the Kabul Military Training Center, the Afghan Army’s central training hub. The soldiers turned out by the camp were sent to operational units in the field. The training center at Camp Shaheen was one of the first regional centers opened but had been run the previous two years by a small number of private contractors and U.S. Army personnel who had acted as mentors to the Afghan trainers. Their insufficient numbers and, according to Lieutenant Vaitor, the lack of personal investment on part of the contractors had resulted in camp where the Afghan trainers were undisciplined and ineffectual, and the recruits often incompetent.
Lieutenant Vaitor and his men set about correcting the myriad deficiencies. They instituted tests at the middle and end of the training cycle to ensure that every recruit in each 1,400-man class met minimum thresholds of proficiency before moving on to their units. They also focused on engaging with their officer and non-commissioned officer counterparts, both on and off the clock, mentoring them on everything from instruction techniques to how to treat subordinates.
“It took a lot of work and was frustrating some of the times,” Vaitor said. “We drank a lot of chai. Some guys listened to us, some guys didn’t. But they learned, and a lot of the [Afghans trainers] took pride in the job they did.” He added: “The guys who were there before us…they didn’t have enough guys to do what we did.”
By September standards had improved immensely. Recruits and trainers were prompt, disciplined, and properly uniformed. Their basic rifle marksmanship scores had increased substantially. (This reflected a countrywide trend: Afghan Army basic rifle marksmanship qualification increased from 35 percent in November 2009 to 97 percent in August 2010). While these improvements were laudatory, Sergeant Pratt was quick to point out that the Afghan soldiers were in no danger of being mistaken for their Western counterparts.
“Fact was more than three-quarters of the guys were still illiterate,” Pratt said. “And training was structured in a way to make sure everybody got the ‘go.’” Pratt described how the ‘React to Ambush’ exercise consisted of recruits lining up and firing at the dirt at twenty-five meters. “I’m not saying these guys were incompetent. Not by a long shot. They were raw recruits after all. But you can only do so much in eight weeks and sometimes you just need live bodies downrange.”
At the recruit training level, the greatest gains came as a result of the increase in the number of coalition trainers at the various Afghan Army recruit training centers scattered throughout the country, according to Dr. Obiad Yuonossi, a Senior Management Scientist at the RAND Corporation and author of The Long March, a study of the Afghan National Army training system from 2002 to 2009. At higher-level training centers the reforms to the assessment system had a larger impact.
The Consolidated Fielding Center (CFC) at Camp Blackhorse outside Kabul was one such training facility. In order for the coalition training authority to expand the Afghan Army by over 70,000 soldiers, the number of Afghan kandaks would have to grow from 117 to 179. And unlike existing units that received individual replacements from within different parts of the training system, new kandaks had to be assembled from whole cloth. The training center at Camp Blackhorse filled this role.
At the training center, Afghan officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers were formed into a cohesive unit and taught to operate as a single entity. Equipment was issued, billets were filled, and platoons and companies were put through rigorous training exercises that would prepare them for operations in the field.
When First Lieutenant Mark Larson arrived at Camp Blackhorse in March 2010, the Capability Milestone system was still in effect. He remembered how, while temporarily working in the logistics department, he and his men were forced to ensure that each new Afghan Army kandak received a certain amount of weapons, communications gear, and vehicles in order to meet the percentage requirements of the Capability Milestone system. If a unit received a smaller percentage of equipment than was expected, the trainers at Blackhorse had to make up the shortfall in another category. If they didn’t, they risked the unit not reaching the minimum thresholds to be considered operational.
“We and everyone else were slaves to the numbers under the CM system,” Lieutenant Larson said.
Such statistics-based assessment carried over to training exercises where Afghan Army sub-units were evaluated on a pass-fail basis. During one such instance – the “React to IED [Improvised Explosive Device]” validation exercise – an overeager Afghan soldier, having spotted the IED buried in the culvert near the road, chose to jog over to the device and raise it triumphantly above his head. The trainers would mark the platoon as having failed the exercise. They would then enter this data point into the system. Provided the other metrics added up, the unit would be validated and sent to the field.
Under the new Commander’s Unit Assessment Tool (CUAT) implemented in June, the trainers in such instances would briefly record what took place and then integrate it into a larger qualitative assessment. While metrics still play a part, their role is now secondary to the assessor’s judgment on areas that include, among others, intelligence, partnership, operations, logistics, education and leadership.
Dr. Mark Moyar, the Director of Research at Orbis Operations and a counterinsurgency specialist, agreed that the new system is a “considerable step up over the old program…It puts a fair amount of emphasis on the leadership side, which I think is the most crucial element, and gets more in-depth on what’s really going on.” He added that within the new assessment framework it is also much harder to “game the system,” referring to the practice of overestimating a unit’s capabilities based purely on whether a unit meets certain statistical milestones.
Other experts though were skeptical of the long-term impact. Dr. Yuonossi and Andrew Exum both pointed to underlying structural issues that could undermine an Afghan Army unit’s ability to act as a neutral arbiter in Afghanistan.
“You look at the composition of the Army and it’s not exactly representative of the larger population. There still aren’t close to enough Pashtuns in the Army, some really small percentage of the total. But the insurgency is still heavily a Pashtun movement,” Exum said, referring to the fact that the Afghan Army is made up overwhelmingly of non-Pashtun soldiers. The Taliban’s ranks on the other hand are still dominated by Pashtun fighters.
Dr. Yuonossi echoed Exum’s thoughts: “You can make the ANA as big as you want and try to improve the quality. But unless you bring in the portion of the population that is supporting the insurgency you will have serious problems, serious issues trying to reconcile the different ethnicities.”
An issue far more important than that of proportional representation is the one hardest to address: that of education and institutional memory. Dr. Moyar cited the example of the Iraqi Army, which, Moyar said, had before the U.S. dissolved it, a professional and educated officer and non-commissioned officer corps, a strong institutional culture that was loyal to the state, and soldiers drawn from a middle-class literate population. When the U.S. was trying to reconstitute the Iraqi Army, it had these factors working in its favor.
Afghanistan is different. For the last three decades Afghanistan has not had a national army. Whatever institutional memory that the pre-1980 Afghan Army possessed has long since disappeared. And the population from which officers and soldiers are drawn is extremely uneducated and desperately poor.
“You can overhaul how units are assessed and how many trainers they use or how many weapons they issue,” Dr. Yuonossi said. “But to overcome the structural issues take time. Many, many years.”
Exum was more blunt: “The ANA will not be self-sustaining [in three or four years]. I think the U.S. and NATO allies will have to provide advisory capability way past 2011 and with respect to logistics and maintenance I expect… [they] will be heavily dependent on U.S. and allied assistance well past 2014.”
When Sergeant Pratt left Camp Shaheen in Mazar-e-Sharif in December of last year, the recruit training center was being run entirely by its Afghan Army cadres. The American forces at the base acted solely as observers, stepping in only when absolutely needed. But despite the considerable progress that had been made, Pratt was not very optimistic about the future: “When mommy’s looking over your shoulder, the kids play nice. But when mommy’s not there…well, you know how it goes.”