Afghan National Army Attrition

[BarakzaiAbdali]

1. Our forces have almost infinite resources compared to the ANA. Need better armored vehicles since wewent to war with the ones we had and they didn't hold up? We can just buy better ones off the shelf. Lost an aircraft or a tank? No big deal we have thousands more. Lacking in trained personnel? Hire contractors from all over the world to fill nearly ever billet short of direct combat troops. How to pay for it all? Just print more money. The ANA simply can't afford to do the types of things we do.

2. Coalition personnel and families are also shielded by long distances from insurgent night visits. The ANA soldier far from his village doesn't have this protection, one knock on the door and he's AWOL.



Take a look at the standard issue M16A2 of the ANA, a weapon which was deemed unsuitable for our field soldiers sometime around 2005 and replaced with the M4. Not only does the unfamiliar M16 have entirely different manual of arms + sights from the Kalashnikov, it requires regular maintenance, replacement of parts, quality ammunition and lubrication, and worst of all for ANA soldiers: reliable magazines. These magazines can't take the abuse of AK magazines since they were designed as replaceable items. If the US Army has such problems replacing its soldier's magazines that we often purchased our own, what chances an ANA troop will get the magazines he needs? Hate to be blunt but these guys are screwed.

SiiNii

This was real helpful. Its ground level and front line information. Please feel free to offer more insight like this in the future as we learn a lot.

What are your thoughts on the reality level of maintaining the 9 bases? My thoughts are that talk is one thing, but the reality will set in a few decades. What I mean is that such an approach is exactly what America's adversaries envisioned when they dragged her into this outcome. What will happen now is:

1) Americans are lured into spending even more money in a sandtrap and will likely try to do so for another decade or two until reality sets in and folks realize that the countryside is not pacifiable like it was in Korea (different values and a different people and a different neighborhood). As the mismatch occurs and public works spending on behalf of the military industrial complex tapers off - resentment will rise in that the plutocracy and the countryside will see less American cash resulting in an even more dangerous situation.

2) Various movements around the world will have a way to still target Americans there (that was one their original goals I think - was to drag them over there)

3) Pakistan will continue its symbiotic relationship since it will continue to back the insurgency to avoid an India centric Afghanistan and still benefit of US economic largesse (enhancing how much money is thrown down the toilet)

This was what Mike Scheuer had to say on the subject a few years back:
Here are two excellent quotes from Marching Towards Hell

"And when during the presidential debate campaign one heard Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama pledge to send two more US brigades to Afghanistan to 'finish the job' one had to wonder if either man or his senior advisors ever looked up a map of the country. There about 6,000 soldiers in two US combat brigades and probably only half of them ar combatants--shooters if you will. Afghanistan is as big as Texas and shares a 2,600 km border with Pakistan. The Taliban can use about a third of Pakistan's territory--the Pashtun tribal region--for safe haven, training, and launching operations against NATO forces...When then could the two senators have been thinking? Were they both ignorant of geographical facts? ... Or were they simply trying to put off delivering to voters the news that saving Washingtons Afghan nation building project would require 200,000 or more troops and then would still have only the slightest chance of succeeding?

"Then, too, we have conducted the Afghan war with startlingly cavalier disregard for geographic realities. It is a country that is as big as Texas... how many troops do the US and NATO have in Afghanistan to defeat an accelerating insurgency? About fifty thousand at this writing. Yes, no kidding, fifty thousand. And in that total there are contingents-- Germans and Danes, for example-- whose rules of engagement make their primary tasks school-building, police training, and well digging, not combat mean to kill insurgents. Even among the national contingents most aggressively fighting the Taliban... the number of support personal today must be a larger percentage of the total force than was the case with the 120,000 man contingent that the Soviet Union fielded.... It always has surprised me that no one in the US media ever asks the US secretary of defense of charman of the joint chiefs of staff what the 'tooth to nail' ratio is for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, or in Iraq for that matter. I suspect that the actual number of combat troops that can be fielded on any given day is only the fraction of the fifty thousand man total and smaller than the reciprocal total for the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and their allies."

Your thoughts on the man's military analysis prowess??? If he is right than 9 bases is like pissing in the wind and is a useless money wasting and life wasting endeavor right?

[SiiNii]

Abdali Saib,

those times are over if they ever existed.

Back in the old days, when an ordinary men´s rifle was comparable to the weaponry of standing armies, ordinary people could withstand invaders.

This is a similar argument used by anti-Constitution gun-grabbers in the USA when their other arguments fall flat. "We can't fight back against modern armies with the guns you can buy at the store".

1. Here in the US I can use the internet and a few gun stores to find nearly all the personal equipment and weapons a light Infantryman would need. Not only that, this off the shelf gear is more capable that what I was issued while in the Army. This is because the Army is a large bureacracy, while our private weapons and equipment industry are forced to innovate often to stay in the black.

2. Barely educated, poorly trained, sandal wearing, naan bread eating Mujahedin using 1960s vintage light weapons are holding their own against ISAF. The Muj are taking far greater casualties but aren't doing badly considering the circumstances. Now if they had our gear, and even half of our training ISAF would have to seriously reevaluate it's strategy.

Nations need intelligence agencies, armed forces, police and border guards, military intelligence, modern weaponry and a doctrine.

I don't think you need a 300k + ANA to do this. I don't think it's even the right way to do it.

Tribes, normal human beings, peasants, teachers and workers aren´t soldiers.

I agree that man to man a professional soldier is superior in combat to a civilian. But the strength of the militia / arbakai system is that it isn't one to one, its one soldier vs twenty militiamen. That evens the odds doesn't it? Let's add the fact that the soldier might have distant and vulnerable supply lines, while the militiaman fights for his own lands on his own lands.

[SiiNii]

Why?

Forgot to add this since I thought it was obvious: The ANA fights the local insurgencies, US military conducts global expeditionary warfare.

[Talal]

I think their main reason for attrition is plain lack of funds due to corruption and their training strategy coupled with the cadet pool..its all very bad for putting up a force from ground up

[khushal]

I think their main reason for attrition is plain lack of funds due to corruption and their training strategy coupled with the cadet pool..its all very bad for putting up a force from ground up

The Americans dont know how to do it Talal.
They pumped a tsunami of cash into Kabul and the managers were the old tapakyan(the gunmen who looted the country after the soviet withdrawal). All those guys know is how to loot and nothing else. The incompetence of the US was a dream come true for them. There was no oversight on the US part and so the managers from the US side were just as corrupt as the old tapakyan. Its takes two to tango.

[khushal]

1. Our forces have almost infinite resources compared to the ANA. Need better armored vehicles since wewent to war with the ones we had and they didn't hold up? We can just buy better ones off the shelf. Lost an aircraft or a tank? No big deal we have thousands more. Lacking in trained personnel? Hire contractors from all over the world to fill nearly ever billet short of direct combat troops. How to pay for it all? Just print more money. The ANA simply can't afford to do the types of

This reminded me of when Reagan told Gorbechev, "you could never beat us in an Arms race because we will outspend you." But its not just about print more money, the US economic system can borrow money from all over the world and borrow money from future generations to fund what needs to be funded.

[Wowra]

Below is an excerpt from the article In the Afghan villages where Taliban still rule
3 October 2011 BBC News

"His older brother, "Abdul Rashid", was not at all ideological. He told me he was in the army just to collect a salary. He did not support either side but, when pressed, said he thought Nato were "infidels", and he feared the insurgents.

"The Taliban control my village," he said. "Elsewhere in the province they have checkpoints on the roads at night everywhere. Without my brother in the Taliban I could be stopped and taken away."

A lieutenant, he was second-in-command of 80 men. Would he help the Taliban if they asked him? An officer in uniform could be a valuable asset to the insurgents.

High-profile attacks

"If the Taliban put pressure on me, I will have to do it for them," he replied miserably.

That was just one family, in one province, Wardak. But the contrast between the reluctant army officer and his committed Talib brother is not good for Nato. The whole strategy to get out of Afghanistan relies on handing over to the local forces, which Nato hopes will fight the Taliban vigorously"

I agree with Siinii to an extent - the vulnerability of family, the lack of sustainability among equipment each compound into the unsustainability of morale and the social psychology of those involved. While local fighters fight as a community - their loss is their villages loss - the ANA Soldier is not so fortunate. He sacrifices (on varying levels), comes home and must keep it a secret. Furthermore, he likely can't see the benefit in his own village. If an ANA soldier is from Asadabad - he'll never see any benefit to his efforts in Daimirdad, Wardak. Except what? Securing the "nation" which is a notion abstract enough to those of us in the first world. So we have a social disconnection within the tribe, and even family compounded by the perceived frivolty of their sacrifice - together these weigh a heavy toll. Ask any Vietnam veteran. Now we place those in the numerator and divide through by the macro-cultural dynamics of obeying Foreign Occupiers from Non-muslim States multiplied by the natural orders of Defiance, Independence, and Piety of Pashtun tribesmen within the brackets of a seriously corrupt government, and you have clarified a lot of the attrition variable for an ANA soldier. Consider the fact that a soldier may be fighting in Paktia while his home in Logar falls under NATO bombs and you have exponentially accelerated his defection, and possibly ensured its violence.

[randolph85]

This is an army where a soldier can buy his rank, our generals are as much top level strategists as gulbo is an engineer or omar is a mullah. its all a joke but i feel bad when ana soldiers lose their lives like i do when talib soldiers do, they are all in way over their heads. none of these people are outright kaffirs, they are just caught up in circumstance.

never mind the fact that a national army is meant to defend the sovereignty of a nation and that ours is created and maintained by the people who have stripped our sovereignty. the recent paki attacks in and around kunar had afghan generals saying they were ready to fight the aggression but hadn't done a thing because they hadn't gotten the word from the defense ministry, the defense ministry was probably asking the american's what they should do while the response was more than likely "uhhh we'll get back to u on that." the army didn't lose its zeal to fight their own people but when it came to an actual attack by a foreign neighbor, they didn't do a damn thing.

[SiiNii]

What are your thoughts on the reality level of maintaining the 9 bases? My thoughts are that talk is one thing, but the reality will set in a few decades. What I mean is that such an approach is exactly what America's adversaries envisioned when they dragged her into this outcome...

Your thoughts on the man's military analysis prowess??? If he is right than 9 bases is like pissing in the wind and is a useless money wasting and life wasting endeavor right?

I didn't work at that level but I can tell you that if the bases are used for air support and maintainers, small SOF strike forces, training facilities for ANA, then the funds needed will be less than current levels. What I witnessed in Afg and Iraq was lots of unecessary equipment and supplies being brought in to support cushy lifestyles of non-combat troops and contractors. On the major bases personnel live in prefab trailers with running water, heat and A/C, internet and eat at large buffet style cafeterias all serviced by 3rd world contractors. We should have saved a lot of money and reduced logistical tail living in tents in safe areas or fortified bunkers if indirect fire is a concern, eating MREs and buying food from the locals. Makes more sense unless you're looking at the bottom line - KBR (company) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


My time is limited so I haven't checked thoroughly but I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't a single congressmember who served in the military who served whether in combat or peacetime at a rank greater than Colonel. The ones who came close were JAGs, medical or pilots like Admiral McCain not commanders of large combat forces. So if anyone is wondering why US politicians seem completely ignorant of simple military concepts, there is your answer.


Less than 200 selected men, correctly employed defeated the Taliban so small numbers isn't an issue as long as the the mission is (a) clearly defined the (b) right resources used. The problem is the goal is too broad, barely defined and the conventional forces are not the right types for counter-insurgency.

[Wowra]

More troops obviously exacerbate the situation. For every infantry platoon you have at least one kid willing to piss in a gatorade bottle and give it to a kid which will obviously turn an entire village red. Surge heralded the end. While less than 200 overthrew the Emirate as government, it took a large, political and blunderous operation to finish. Neither here nor there, at this point in time. The Emirate is no longer a standing army, and not necessarily seen as an oppressive regime but a viable option in a large portion of the country. Not to mention the extreme degradation of the SOF community brought about by SWIC and standard reduction through expansion. The only military presence needed in Afghanistan is static security of those 9 posts that are hopefully used in a PRT capacity.