Esquire Article

This article in Esquire was recommended to me by my Uncle and I diligently read it on a recent airplane trip. A few things jumped out at me. A reinforced Infantry company conducts a sweep of a ridgeline, searching for arms caches and insurgents. They tramp up and then down the ridgeline for two days, through dense underbrush, find no insurgents or weapons caches, but sustain a handful of injuries from exhaustion, dehydration, and sprained ankles. Am I describing a mission in Afghanistan or Vietnam?
Next:

One of the organizing ideas behind [the operation] had been to get the Afghan army, which has been improving in skill in recent years, to search an important village and try to trip up, or even catch, Haji Matin [a local insurgent leader], the owner of the valley's idled sawmill.

...[the operation] was meant to disrupt these locals by placing an American company on the insurgents' ridge and simultaneously placing an Afghan company in position to sweep a village Haji Matin frequented. The battalion had planned it this way, and briefed it this way, and then, the day before the mission began, word came from Kabul that the village search was canceled.

And yet the mission went ahead. This strikes me as sticking to a plan, even when the facts on the ground have changed.
Finally, the role of Haji Matin in the insurgency was what really confounded me. His sawmill was idled by a government decree that prohibited most logging. This left Matin, his mill workers, and the loggers out of jobs and pushed them into the arms of the insurgency. The author points out that the desire to expel the American invaders from their valley was also a motivating factor for the insurgency, but the Afghan governments logging prohibition is important for two reasons.
First, it presents an opportunity for the Afghan government and the American forces to disaggregate the insurgency. Let them log! If we can peel off even some of the insurgents by allowing them to resume their former occupations with a simple concession like allowing them to log then why not?
Second, this smacks of the US inserting itself on one side in a minor, perhaps ethnically motivated, conflict. This results in American forces becoming part of the conflict, and unable to function as a neutral arbiter working to resolve the problem. Yes, American forces need to support the Afghan government. But if they are seen as the Karzai faction's attack dog, we will never be able to effectively promote the reconciliation required to achieve a long term solution in Afghanistan.

Undermining the "Strategic Corporal"

I've never spent much time pondering the NCO promotion system, and why should I? It had never affected me before. But now, as a PL, one of my responsibilities is promoting talented Soldiers, or preventing promotions, as the case may be.

My PSG and I sent an E5 to the E6 board last month. This E5 is everything one could ask for in a young NCO and more. Anything I ask for will be done to the utmost of his ability. He is conscientious about developing his Soldiers, he is impressively knowledgeable about Afghanistan, he is tactically and technically competent, he spends his personal time thinking about the mission at hand and how to accomplish it, ultimately, he is the most competent person in my platoon. He is one of those NCOs that our Cadre were talking about when they said to naive Cadets "Don't worry, your NCOs will teach you all that you need to know." (Unfortunately, they never mentioned the 50% of NCOs that don't know enough - and don't care to - square a young officer away, but I digress). If any NCO should make E6, this is the one.

But I misjudged - and failed to understand - the NCO promotion system. Professional competency doesn't seem to really matter. Development of subordinates, not too important, personal development towards understanding Afghanistan - overrated. 1SGs and CSMs really only care to promote NCOs who remember an insignificant detail of the morning news, who have spent time memorizing the minutia of Drill and Ceremony (time that could have been spent on the Pashtunwali).

Yes, NCOs are responsible for studying for the board. But in the case of this NCO, he transferred over from the Navy less than 2 years ago. Some of the regulation-based knowledge that Soldiers pick up along the way was lost upon him. Because he wasn't well schooled in nonsense that is easily looked up, he failed to make E6.

Much as been made of the "strategic corporal" or the importance of decentralized decisions made by junior NCOs on the ground. However, the NCO promotion boards must be redirected from the simple memorization of regulation minutia - metric that absolutely fails at indicating leadership potential, and refocused on questions regarding technical competency, knowledge of the deployment AO and situational leadership challenges. Furthermore, boards should not be the determining promotion factor, and should be subjugated to evaluations written by the NCOs chain of command. Only when the NCO promotion system has been altered to reflect this new focus will the Army see the greatest gains from the "strategic corporal."

Infantry Basic Officer Leadership, good prep?

Infantry Basic Officer Leadership Course (IBOLC) is over. Overall, it was a good course at giving me technical tools but it was not a good course for creating a good mindset.

The Turkish international student in our platoon, Ferhat, was named the international honor graduate and had some especially cogent criticisms. He said that the situations we face were mostly canned and did not correlate to what we will be facing when we deploy. Every time we do a mission we go in knowing the exact enemy situation. We know where he is, what he will do, and how many people he has. He behaved like a conventional opponent every time. Whenever we attacked he would stay and fight when an irregular opponent would have broken contact. Also, we initiated almost all of our engagements, whereas in reality the insurgent initiates the vast majority.

He did say our training was very good on the whole. I did learn a lot about things like how to think about security in all environments and how to employ machine guns well. I also got good feedback from the cadre on how to communicate orders better and delegate to make my life easier.

At the same time, his criticisms were definitely valid. IBOLC did not help prepare us for the ambiguity that we will face having to react to a daring an crafty enemy who hits us at our weakest points. Also, it was very process oriented. We went into a situation we knew and had faced before, and just had to follow a process to get the job done. If they had taught the classes in a way that asked more questions and put us in unfamiliar situations we would have had a different experience.