Training for Afghanistan

[davidbfpo]

This new thread is a collection of now historical posts on various aspects of pre-deployment training: COIN, language, people and more. Part of SWJ's mission is to record lessons learnt for the future. Due to the posts being old they will appear before this post.

Post relevant to intelligence have been added to an old thread 'Company Level Int Led Operations', although they also apply to working in a larger command:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=3797

I still think as a non-military "armchair" intelligence officer that is one of the threads that remains of value today.

[marct]

Moderator's Note

This new thread is a collection of now historical posts on various aspects of pre-deployment training: COIN, language, people and more. Part of SWJ's mission is to record lessons learnt for the future. Due to the posts being old they will appear before this post (ends).

Post relevant to intelligence have been added to an old thread 'Company Level Int Led Operations', although they also apply to working in a larger command:http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=3797

I still think as a non-military "armchair" intelligence officer that is one of the threads that remains of value today.



Hi Folks,

Here are the original terms of reference - just for the record

********
As a brigade we are spending the next 18 months getting to grips with COIN; a better understanding of and working in different cultures and then getting to know and understand Afghanistan.

These are in 3 main areas: COIN theory and practice, cultural awareness and flexibility. Lastly Afghanistan, acknowledging that the situation now is going to be very different from the situation in two years when we deploy again.

Army officers mostly like to be spoon-fed stuff, while acknowledging that there is an element of spoon-feeding required we have issued a fairly extensive reading list with training aids and expect then to feed themselves, but what we want to encourage and develop is the ability for our people to think more deeply and critically about the issues concerned and ask 'why': 'Why are we doing this?' 'Why are they doing that?' 'What should we be doing?’

To do this we are looking for speakers to engage with us, but also to challenge us. Speakers from non-military and non-western backgrounds can be particularly effective at this.
**********

Personally, I'm looking forward to this. I think we can do an excellent job and put together a really great program and set of resources.

Cheers,

Marc

[davidbfpo]

Attached is a list of suggestions for speakers and a variety of points - mainly on training, put together by Marc T, with some help from non-SWJ members and I.


davidbfpo

[Red Rat]

Great to have everyone on board!

By close of play today I will post on this forum the planned study day schedule for the brigade, cultural training plan and anything else that I think may be useful.

The brigade has considerable Iraq experience (last deployment 2008) but limited Afghanistan experience. Increasingly there is limited N. Ireland experience as well, and what there is is confined to Majors plus for officers and Command Sergeant Majors plus for ORs.

I think that our primary areas of weakness are:

COIN theoretical knowledge
Cultural knowledge and awareness - AFG specific
HQ procedures - specifically integration of and working with Host Nation Forces, OGD, IOs & NGOs
The whole Influence thing..........

End State: A bde well versed in COIN and trained to conduct operations amongst the people (and not around them).

More to follow.

[mhusband]

Hi Folks,

These are in 3 main areas: COIN theory and practice, cultural awareness and flexibility. Lastly Afghanistan, acknowledging that the situation now is going to be very different from the situation in two years when we deploy again.

Marc,

I am very glad that these are your 3 main areas. From working at the regional, provincial and district levels in Kandahar I can tell you from firsthand experience that knowing culture/people is vital in COIN. All too many times do we have service members that want play "cowboy" when at the end of the day our efforts should be about the Afghan people.

The US COL John Cuddy, I served with in '08 could be a very good reference source for you, if interested. He was the Regional Police Advisory Command (RPAC) Commanding Officer and had a lot of positive support from the Afghan National Police (almost legendary).

Mike

[Red Rat]

Mike,

US COL John Cuddy sounds like an excellent Point of Contact. As MarcT said, one of the things we want to do is establish is the DB of contacts. The UK is very good at identifying best practice, very bad at disseminating it in a timely and relevant fashion... I see the DB as much like the bde reading list, less of a reading list and more of a reading guide to what is good, not so good, relevant, pertinent and sometimes just plain fun!

We are very clear in the bde that we first need to understand COIN - the type of operations we are in, and then understand AFPAK, the context in which it is happening. The latter is going to be much more difficult then the former, especially from a distance.


RR

[jcustis]

Gentlemen,

Thank you for including me in this PTP. My requirements might lend themselves best to working the seams and margins, and providing insight or tools where applicable, but I readiy admit that my degree of contribution will be limited by my day job as an executive officer and all the babysitting that that sometimes requires.

Some truth in advertising:

-I have been to Iraq three times...'03 for the invasion, '04-'05 in Al Anbar and Fallujah v.2.0, and '08-'09, where we started off in Anbar, but shortly wound up in the north near Mosul, where the situation was vastly different from the south and it took us a long time to get past the drama of the intel report and start seeing things for what they really were, then do something about it.

-I am the lead for working the Lines of Operation, in whatever capacity they might be by the time we get over, which will be in less that a year.

-I hope to glean the following from this forum:

-An understanding of the economics of Helmand and points south (i.e. current USMC territory.
-An understanding of the current state of LOOs (Economics, Governance, Security, Rule of Law, Agriculture, Essential Services), and what makes the Afghan mind tick in relation to them. For example, is it uncommon to care whether the streets are being kept clean and young men kept at work?
-An understanding of successful development projects that have taken root and provided alternatives to being on the take for the Taliban, providing comfort, aid, and sanctuary for the Taliban, or at least generated information to fill intelligence gaps.
-Successful engagement strategies for key leaders at the village and major urban area-level.
-An understanding of the common narrative that the Taliban is exploiting (if it is more than simple threats of bodiy harm), and the common narrative used by Pashtuns.

I need to learn a lot, but I will try to ask intriguing questions .

[Red Rat]

The issue has cropped up about language training. We are putting a considerable amount of effort into language training (despite one senior officer saying it added no value and all one needed was interpreters...).

We will be operating in Helmand and the majority of language training is focused on Pashtu. However some elements will be working with the ANA for which Dari may be more appropriate and some may be working with the ANP (a new experience for us). What language is most relevant for the ANP? Dari or Pashtu?

My experience of Afghanistan was in the north and I focused on learning Dari. Dari was touted as the 'lingua franca' of Afghanistan. How widely spoken is it in the southern provinces?

[marct]

I can't answer for the breakdown, but my guess would be Pasto would be more important. Ideally, all of your people should have basic survival language skills in both. BTW, "survival" level language skills vary with the complexity of the language: in English, it's about 300 words with little or no grammar.

You might want to take a look at this and see if it would be useful (I've heard some pretty good things about it). Last I heard, it's about U$1200 per network.

[mhusband]

A few quick points...

ANP (at the lower levels) are local to the area so if you’re working with them know Pashto.

ANA more than likely they will be speaking Dari because they are from all over the country (working in the south is considered a "hardship duty")

Something that you might find interesting is that the majority of senior officer do have some Russian training which you'll have to take the good with the bad (understanding of maps and tactics but is extremely stove-piped and corrupt).

A good terp is vital... spend the 300-500 dollars (each) a month to get a good group of them

[marct]

A good terp is vital... spend the 300-500 dollars (each) a month to get a good group of them

Absolutely! You also need to establish a protocol both for the interpreters and for those using their services. One of the key points is that they should translate everything, not just a synopsis, and that it should be recorded. The reasons for this are simple. First, you are dealing with a primarily oral culture group that uses stories both to inform and answer questions. Second, the choice of which story is used may give you clues as to the probable / expected outcome of an event and/or the perceptions of what is actually going on.

Steve Featherston had an article in Harpers last year that illustrates some of this quite nicely (I just tossed it up at the Rat Pack library).

Cheers,

Marc

[Red Rat]

Apologies (MarcT ) for the tardiness!

Background

The UK army training system is based around the Formation Operational Readiness Cycle (FORM Cycle). This sees formations undergoing a cycle of (6 months on each stage):

Special to Arm Training up to sub-unit level
All arms training sub-unit to unit level
High Readiness (blurring into)
Mission Specific Training
Operational deployment

Non-mission specific training was focused on maintaining 'conventional' major combat operations (MCO) capabilities with the ethos that we could 'ramp down' to COIN but could not ramp up from COIN to MCO. Fighting in Helmand and Basra indicated that we needed to be able to maintain our MCO capabilities. This training cycle did not however build in any sort of Influence training and failed to take into account that the structures and processes used in both Iraq and Afghanistan were moving away from those adopted and used in generic training.

The good news is that we have moved away from that system to one focused much more tightly on the current campaign and COIN.

As a brigade we will conduct our unit level training in mid-2010, with mission specific training commencing late 2010. Rather then 'carry on normal jogging' we are trying to take all the elements that we can from the new system (accepting that we will not have the resources in most cases) and super-impose them on the old cycle. That means for the most part a great deal of conceptual training and re-writing all our exercises to make them more relevant.

For conceptual training we have come up with a series of Study Days to be held in Germany. Outline details are attached. We have also developed a reading list for which funding has come through and it looks like it is going to go army wide. That is fine for the broadbrush detail, but now we are looking at the nitty gritty:

Exercise Design
Inculcating Influence Awareness and Practice at all levels
Cultural Awareness at all levels (acknowledging that exercises will not be set (or resourced to be) in Afghanistan under the current system).

there is a large amount of churn underway at the moment and a great deal of time is spent sorting wheat from chaff at my level!!! The move to the new system has generated a great deal of turmoil and we appear to sit astride all the cracks! That said we are already developing a reputation as the brigade with best practice - no small part due to this forum.

I will upload shortly detailed training objectives for some of the study days as well as a declassified version of our cultural and language training plan.

[mhusband]

Good stuff.. Just read through the Test Plan outline...

One quick point... I would deffinately make it a priority to understand the culture specific to Afghanistan.

From experience while working with the ANP there seemed to be a negative undertone toward the UK service members. I think this might have to do with the history more so than what is going on today, but it still should be understood.

[Red Rat]

I think for key commanders and staff we will have to. There are 2 problems:

1) We do not want to confuse soldiers with multiple scenarios. Once they start focusing on Afghanistan then they start almost 'total immersion'.

2) For key commanders and staff the sooner the process of building knowledge on AFPAK society and culture the better. Problem is we have a very very high turnover of key staff before we deploy.

RR

[mhusband]

Problem is we have a very very high turnover of key staff before we deploy.

RR

Are the new guys at least going to get there for the training?

[jcustis]

The term "LOO Team" is locally used by me to describe the group of folks within our battalion who are tasked with non-kinetic targeting and work along the Lines Of Operation of Internal Security, Governance, Essential Services, Rule of Lay, Economics, and Agriculture. In a perfect world, it meets regularly to engage in a review of actions past, current, and planned, in order to develop non-kinetic targets that can be addressed with a variety of options, ranging from info ops, key leader engagement between chaplains and mullahs, and CERP projects.

Team participation is expected to come from myself (Bn XO), the Bn Informations Officer, Staff Judge Advocate, Intel, Psyop, Operations, Civil Affairs, and a few other reps.

In practice during our last deployment, the LOO team did not fair well for a number of reasons, namely because our mission in northern Iraq meant that reconstruction and development was nowhere near the priority that it was in Anbar, and that we were constrained from project work because we expected to have a short-duration mission requirement.

I think we also did poorly because the focus of the unit's PTP was on the "tough math" of kinetic efforts, and therefore the components of the team never came together for any training, education, etc., prior to the deploy. We ended up doing a lot of exploratory learning that went only slightly farther than understanding the principles of money as a weapons system, and knocking out a couple of projects that, while doing some good, didn't get us to our commander's goal of using non-kinetic effects to glean information for kinetic targeting.

So...with all that out of the way, I have a chance to make things right this time and pull many of the team members together prior to the deployment so that we are more effective. Based on the description of our future task, I am seeking input on texts, training (in the way of courses/PME) and training methodology, etc., I could use in the pursuit of getting our LOO team organized and aimed in the right direction.

The first task for all hands will be a read and discussion of White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group's Report on U.S. Policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has essentially become the US administration's policy for action in the region.

That will be followed by a discussion of the Peters' book Seeds of Terror.

I think the next focus will be on leader engagement/shura participation strategies and perhaps some role-play, but beyond that I am starting to draw a few blanks and hence my quest.

Outside of a command of 30-50 Pashtu and Dari control words required by all hands, we are not (due to time constraints) learning the language. We are also limited (due to our primary billets) of only meeting perhaps twice a month between now and next Spring.

[Red Rat]

Jon,

Having looked at our bde TTPs I know we do it (LOO team), I am just not sure how...

Key to the LOO capability (apologies of teaching to suck eggs, but in all 3 areas my HQ is currently deficient) is:

• Subject area expertise of respective staff
• In depth knowledge of relevant operational area/culture
• Tried and tested HQ procedures to integrate the LOO with all bn ops

On the last point the emphasis in the campaign seems to be shifting away from the kinetic; you may find yourself main effort and not necessarily an enabler for kinetic ops!

What types of HQ training do you have planned before you deploy? If we have an idea of the type of training you will be doing I may be able to give some pointers on what could be incoporated. For example my HQ has a considerable series of non-mission specific synthetic and field training exercises planned where we are going to develop and refine our TTPs.

One thing we are doing is organising some informal get togethers with non-military people who have extensive COIN and/or Afghan experience to get their perspective on how we (the military) do business. IOs and NGOs have come forward, they are very wilco but like things kept very low key and off the record (I bribe them with the promise of good food, fine wine and my scintillating company!). We are hoping to get a different perspective on how we do business as well as access to some in-depth cultural knowledge.

MarcT has made the point that the narrative continuity is very important. As soon as possible you want to understand the plan of the unit you are replacing and the actions they are taking. Depending how good your links to theatre are (ours are very bad!) you may want to start shadowing what they do. When your team meets up you will have concrete scenarios and actions to discuss.

[marct]

Hi Callum,

One thing we are doing is organising some informal get togethers with non-military people who have extensive COIN and/or Afghan experience to get their perspective on how we (the military) do business. IOs and NGOs have come forward, they are very wilco but like things kept very low key and off the record (I bribe them with the promise of good food, fine wine and my scintillating company!). We are hoping to get a different perspective on how we do business as well as access to some in-depth cultural knowledge.

That is a really good idea. I'm trying to see if I can get a get-together like that set up for you in Ottawa for when you are over here - if you're interested .

MarcT has made the point that the narrative continuity is very important. As soon as possible you want to understand the plan of the unit you are replacing and the actions they are taking. Depending how good your links to theatre are (ours are very bad!) you may want to start shadowing what they do. When your team meets up you will have concrete scenarios and actions to discuss.

Part of that narrative continuity lies in "naming". So, for example, if Jon's unit uses the term Civil Affairs Officer as the key contact for local micro-development efforts, you should use the same term.

This brings up another point which has been problematic for me as I look at the effort in Afghanistan - poor reachback. In simple terms, "corporate knowledge" of an area gets lost with each unit rotating out and the handover when a new unit comes in tends to be dominated by the most immediate common denominator (aka kinetic potential). This is a real problem, and it's one that I think we should be thinking about.

This entire project is, in some ways, an attempt to circumvent the institutional lack of a decent reachback facility (as is Rach's CMO). It may be seriously woth thinking about designating someone as a reachback officer - someone whose focus is on making sure that knowledge gets stored where it can be accessed by other units going into the area (assume a FOUO level) and where people who are subject matter experts can be contacted.

[jcustis]

As soon as possible you want to understand the plan of the unit you are replacing and the actions they are taking. Depending how good your links to theatre are (ours are very bad!) you may want to start shadowing what they do. When your team meets up you will have concrete scenarios and actions to discuss.

That's an excellent point, and one thing we did not do at all before our last deploy. It is good fortune that the exact unit we expect to replace is conducting work-ups right next door to our CP, so I will take little bit of a look at what they have cooking. I'm afraid it won't be much though.