Unlimited OPM

OPM stands for “Other People’s Money,” and our politicians are getting so good at spending it that they are currently spending OPM that they have not even earned yet.  Conventional wisdom holds that access to unlimited funds would benefit a military engaged in extended combat operations, but the opposite is true.  The abundance of money (in theory, mind you, America really doesn’t have any more to spend now) is a curse to the military leader and our current military effort.  It allows us to get away with things like procuring a million-dollar ATV MRAP for every fireteam in every squad in every platoon deployed here, which, for a Marine infantry Battalion, would equal somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 MRAPs for the entire Battalion.  If you think it is a good thing for a Marine infantry Battalion to have 120 million in MRAP rolling stock, you’re wrong.

Before I get to that, I need to send a hat tip out to Nathan Hodge and Noah Schactman at Wired’s Danger Room for putting up a post featuring a prominent photo of your humble correspondent.  The Danger Room post got me invited to the Alyona Show – they emailed me a clip of Joshua Faust from Registan being interviewed by Alyona, and I figured if Joshua is on board, so am I.

I agreed to be taped late at night, local time, and, having read Joshua’s post about his segment, tried to take off the tape from my glasses and glue them together.  It didn’t work, so I ditched the glasses, moved the laptop far enough away to see, and was all set to talk with Alyona.  Only you don’t get to talk to Alyona; all you see is a Skype screen with your video going and nothing else.

I had no idea where to look because looking at me looking at me is weird, so in the video, I look more like Stevie Wonder, looking around all over the place, than somebody having a conversation.  It is not too bad to watch – clearly the “contractor” thing was what she wanted to talk about, and like all Americans, when she thinks contractor, she thinks Blackwater.  When I think of a contractor, I think of large numbers of big guys (not fit guys)  assigned to the FOBs who never leave.  The number of contractors operating outside the wire is a minuscule percentage of the contractors working this campaign, and most of them are implementers, not security types.

To illustrate the curse of OPM on military operations, I’ll use The Bot as an example.  As I mentioned, the Bot has been deployed to the south and is now based in Kandahar City.  He had to move around a lot and had dyed his hair and beard black, making him look like some kind of pirate when he was wearing a turban.  Being a vain man (and because he’s smart)  he won’t let me post any pictures of him, but he has an interesting observation on what it’s like to be outside the wire and mixed in with the population of Kandahar.

Yesterday, The Bot almost ran afoul of Taliban checkpoints twice in the middle of the day, and both checkpoints were within four miles of the massive Kandahar Airfield, where something like 22,000 NATO military troops are stationed “protecting the Afghan people.” The MO for both illegal checkpoints was the same: the villains wore yellow reflective vests commonly used by Afghan cash-for-work crews and placed their weapons in wheelbarrows, hiding them with shovels and brooms.  They rucked up to their selected positions, which happened to be on the main ring road (Rte 4) about three miles to the Spin Boldak side (at around 0900 in the morning), and another group was on the main road into Kandahar City at about 1100 in the morning.  They stopped cars, checked for anyone with a cell phone or ID card that would connect them to the government or the international military, and executed at least one local man who failed to pass muster.

The Bot had no problems identifying these Taliban checkpoints for what they were and avoiding them. Even with his language skills and dyed hair, he is not going to fool any Afghan into thinking he is a local if given more than a casual glance. Because The Bot and the rest of us do not have unlimited amounts of OPM, we have to find ways to move around and work, making do with what we can afford in the local market.  When faced with tactical problems, the outside-the-wire contractor has to develop a tactical solution or move their operations onto military bases, where they can accomplish little aside from billing hours to their contracts and collecting massive paychecks. There are many tactical options; the most common is the use of motorcycle outriders who communicate by hand and arm signals, since handheld radios are illegal here.  Unless you are a licensed security company, in which case they are legal but still subject to confiscation by the ANP (especially in Kabul)

The American military was once famous for its ability to organize complex endeavors with limited resources.  Now it is famous for organizing unnecessarily complex schemes using unlimited resources.  The price you pay when given unlimited resources is the current inability to solve the most fundamental tactical problems using the initiative and creativity of your troops at the pointy end of the spear.   We encase our troops in heavy body armor, which limits their mobility, quickly saps their endurance, and renders them almost immobile, making them much easier to hit.  That so many survive being shot is great, but I’m solidly in the “I’d rather not go down with heat stroke, or sustain chronic injuries to my ankles, knees, or hips” camp.  We then provide multi-million dollar “mine resistant” vehicles which protect against most improvised explosives, but cannot protect our troops from standard military anti-tank mines, a munition found in abundance throughout Afghanistan.

We, the United States, said Kandahar was the key and our next big push.  Just like we did in the Helmand Province, we broadcast our plans in the media – we told the Taliban we were coming after them.  We unleashed the varsity SF and focused the JPEL on Kandahar, we talked and talked and talked until just hours before D-day, and then we put the whole thing on hold because “the Afghans aren’t ready.”    Were the Afghans ready when the Marine Brigade started their operations in the Helmand Province last summer?  No, they weren’t. And they are not ready now to take over for the Marines, which is a huge problem currently not being addressed with anything resembling a workable solution because the Department of State and USAID are involved, and they have collectively learned not one damn thing from their nine-year record of mission failure in Afghanistan.

So we broadcast our next “big push” into Kandahar, the villains respond with their own shaping operation attacking international aid workers (which I predicted they would based on the irresponsible crap published by the NYT,) killing security officials and tribal elders in broad daylight and they are now setting up road blocks and executing Afghans who they think are linked to the government or international forces in the middle of the day within line of sight of the massive ISAF air base.

This is not good.  It should not be tolerated, nor does it have to be, if we unleash the creative ingenuity of American infantry who love to develop techniques and tactics tailored to specific situations, that allow them to get the drop on scumbags and kill them.  If we were not burdened with the unlimited resources and forced to make do with what we can find on hand, do you think American infantry guys could not figure out a way to combat the Taliban in Kandahar?

Here is the real crime: if you deployed your infantry with simple open-ended mission-type orders, it would take many fewer of them than we currently use in offensive operations.  An infantry company can call upon and control more firepower, with pinpoint accuracy, than was available to an infantry division in World War II.  You could take a Marine rifle company, tell the young captain to spread his platoons into four strong points around Kandahar City, augment them with a platoon of ANA, and tell them to figure out a way to stop the damn Taliban checkpoints.

If they were allowed to war game up a solution and implement it, you would end up with all sorts of local vehicles that are carrying uniformed troops working with outriders on motorcycles to try and detect these checkpoints, roll up on them, and then jump them the Marine Corps way, using point-blank automatic weapons fire.  How many counter-checkpoint hits do you think it would take before the checkpoints disappeared?  Plus, it pumps up the troops to be on the offensive,  whacking cretins who need to be whacked.

Here is the point: protecting the population means being out with the population.  Every evening, the sound of rifle fire erupts all around the Taj.  We are a mere 5 miles away from districts that are dominated by the Taliban.  Soon, Jalalabad, one of the country’s safest cities, will become like Kandahar.  What if we decided to get off the massive Jalalabad FOB and actually embed with the people of Jalalabad?  How would that be different from what we are doing now?

If we gave Jalalabad a rifle company and told them to embed with the local security forces, become visible to the people while ensuring the security forces do their job, we would see ANP and ANA trucks with Americans in them, and we would see the incidence of police shaking down local businessmen evaporate overnight.  Businessmen would be accustomed to seeing the same Americans and would be confident that, if they told them about the shakedown, something would be done about it.

Take this one step further: the rifle company commander comes to know the city as well as I do and, at no additional cost, does things that make life better for all residents.  Here is one: kill all the stray, feral dogs that run amok in the city, inflicting, on average, seven to eight serious bites on children nightly. I admit that most of these kids brought that upon themselves, given their penchant for torturing small animals, but still, that is a lot of dog bites.

Here’s another: take the “vector control truck” off FOB Fenty and send it into the refugee camps to eradicate the vermin (and the damn scorpions) which plague those poor people.

Better yet, take two of the vector control trucks and begin mosquito eradication, as malaria is endemic in Jalalabad.   Before long, the rifle company commander would know Jalalabad as I know it, and the people would know him as they do the many international reconstruction teams who have been here for years.  When he has proved that you can operate outside the wire in the same vehicles used by Afghan security forces, that you can bring out vector control trucks and other support vehicles to help the people through a long, hot summer (and Ramadan will occur during the summer this year, which is going to really suck).

There has been much in the press concerning our intelligence agencies and their inability to produce meaningful products. Recently, I had the distinct pleasure of driving a senior American and three of his guys from Gen Flynn’s J2 office to Kabul. They sent me an unclassified assessment of Jalalabad City and the Beshud district, which surrounds most of the city.  Sixty-three pages of stuff, and guess what?  It was excellent; a commander could pick it up, read it in an afternoon, and gain a very good understanding of the city and its prominent players.

What is missing from the assessment is personal familiarity with the key power players and with the terrain and situation for the average Afghan businessman.  Information that a smart guy could pick up in two weeks on the street.

There is nothing difficult about getting out and operating aggressively in most contested regions.  It seems pretty straightforward to me.  Which brings me to my final topic, and it is not something Americans should be happy about.  I have been hearing for weeks rumors about the detention of this guy:

I have heard about this from both prominent Afghans and a USG  source with impeccable credentials who has never been wrong.  The media story is here, and that story is that the Pakistan ISI has Mullah Omar under house arrest, that our government knows this, but for some reason wants to keep it a secret.

Not everyone I have contacted about this story has heard these rumors, and a few important, well-informed milbloggers flat out do not believe them.  Regardless, this story has legs, and if it is true, there is a huge, huge problem.  That problem is very simple – there should be no doubt about what happens when an allied intelligence service gets its hands on Mullah Omar.

There is nothing to discuss, nothing to think through, nothing to spin; there is only this: give him to us.  Immediately.  End of negotiation. There should be no question on the part of the USG about what to do with this dirtbag either.  He is an unlawful enemy combatant and needs to be detained and held for trial by military tribunal.  There is no other conceivable option.  If this story proves true, and I think it is, what the hell is going on back in DC?  This isn’t a game, dammit; it’s war, and it needs to be treated as such.