Was it possible to build the ANA without being dependent on US?

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etxag02
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2:35p, 8/31/21

An Afghan general said in a OpEd that one of the main reasons their military collapsed in 11 days was because they "lost contractor logistics and maintenance support critical to our combat operations."

Was it possible to build the ANA without being dependent on the US?

Why did we build it that way?

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DevilD77
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3:52p, 8/31/21
AG
Probably, could have been built differently but all our government officials wouldn't be getting their kickbacks if we didn't buy all the equipment from American manufacturers.
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nortex97
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In reply to etxag02 • 4:39p, 8/31/21
AG
Yes, absolutely. It could have been built as a somewhat primitive tribal-based organization, each group responsible for specific geographies, and paid/incentivized to manage them well. But we tried, again, to be better than that, because that's how we teach field grade officers to think.

As with football coaches, militaries tend to do that which they are familiar with. In our case, we built it as a 'mini' US Army dependant on air support/disciplined leadership/communications/night operations/vision/combined arms etc. Neat, until we pulled out the 3-stool leg of the coordinators for air support operations/contractors at Kandahar.

Pick whatever your favorite movie is about modern US failures (Benghazi/Blackhawk Down/Lone Survivor, whatever), it doesn't work well when comms/air support/indirect fire fall apart.

Ultimately, if you're not willing to go to 'total war' and utterly annihilate an enemy, regardless if he flees behind some international line, then war is pointless, and more cruel than it even needs to be. Sadly, almost none of our politicians get that, and perhaps only a small minority of senior military leadership, nowadays.
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HollywoodBQ
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In reply to etxag02 • 6:43p, 8/31/21
AG
etxag02 said:
Was it possible to build the ANA without being dependent on the US?

Why did we build it that way?
A - No
B - $$$$

Weapons and Tactics - those two things have gone hand-in-hand since forever.
New weaponry = new tactics to take advantage of the new weapons.
From there it follows that new weapons probably require a new force structure, organizations, etc.
New weapons from the USA are going to require maintenance, support, etc.

There are layers to the complexity of the force structure and operations and of course there are multiple dimensions to the fighters themselves.

The USA has had generations of professional soldiers now, NCOs especially. That gives us a huge advantage. We're also a nation with OK education levels and reasonably high literacy. We can do things that foreign nationals won't be able to do - ever.

Grabbing some Afghans and providing them with the best training and equipment isn't going to produce a winning result, if the Afghans you're working with have no real interest in being in the military anyway.

The enemy on the other hand, they have a very strong interest / motivation in defeating the American equipped and trained military. That desire is always going to prevail.

In a lot of ways, this would be like taking the Los Angeles Lakers to train a local basketball team in Central Africa. They could give the guys all the NBA apparel, nice facilities, have LeBron teach them how to play and they might become mediocre. But, take all that support away and they're going to go right back to where they were because they don't have any interest, commitment, funding, etc.

The result in Afghanistan shouldn't surprise anybody.
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Smeghead4761
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7:39p, 8/31/21
I don't know if it was possible to build a GIRoA that wasn't dependent on U.S. help/funding, much less security forces.

Afghanistan is an extremely poor country. When it's not having civil wars, the government's almost entire income comes from transit fees on cargo moved by truck from ports in Pakistan to the land locked post-Soviet -stans.

What was needed was an ANA (and ANP and ABP) that, not only could the Afghans use and maintain without U.S. help, but without U.S. funding. And that isn't much security forces at all.

Given that the Taliban were funded by Pakistan (and rich Persian Gulf Arabs who like to fund jihad, since that doesn't require them to give up air conditioning and German luxury cars), the Taliban might well have been better off, in terms of what they could afford, than the ANSF. Plus the Taliban were getting operational support from the Pak ISI and probably regular army, as well.
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InfantryAg
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8:08p, 8/31/21
AG
I disagree with Hollywood's overall "no" to building the afghan forces, but concur with the rest.

Especially the fact that the professional NCO corps gives us a huge advantage.

One of the ANA's problems (when I was there) was the overall weak leadership. The ANA Captain I worked with was an egotistical petty tyrant. The NCOs were not chosen because of their leadership ability. Some was by their family connections. I'm not sure how else they were picked, but I saw mostly either figureheads or more petty tyrants. The corruption was off the charts with the officers. Stolen pay, stolen (and sold) weapons, pay for soldiers that weren't there etc. And soldiers that just weren't motivated and were basically on a jobs program.

The Taliban (and the other groups) have strong charismatic leaders and a group of highly motivated fighters.

Equipping a a group of 3rd world soldiers with M4/M16s instead of the perfectly capable (and much more suitable) AK is a straight up defense contractor money making fraud. Same thing with blackhawks. That's an expensive aircraft to fly and maintain, it would have required maintenance contractors for the life of the program. There may not be enough UH1s available to supply them with, but a similar airframe with it's easy maintenance and low costs would have still given a huge advantage to the Afghan forces. Gen 2 night vision is cheaper, more plentiful, and still gives a huge advantage.

A Combined Arms doctrine, was only going to work with our support, but was overkill on the tools needed.

I don't know how you fix the motivation (lack thereof) of the soldiers.

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UTExan
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In reply to InfantryAg • 9:48p, 8/31/21
InfantryAg said:
I disagree with Hollywood's overall "no" to building the afghan forces, but concur with the rest.

Especially the fact that the professional NCO corps gives us a huge advantage.

One of the ANA's problems (when I was there) was the overall weak leadership. The ANA Captain I worked with was an egotistical petty tyrant. The NCOs were not chosen because of their leadership ability. Some was by their family connections. I'm not sure how else they were picked, but I saw mostly either figureheads or more petty tyrants. The corruption was off the charts with the officers. Stolen pay, stolen (and sold) weapons, pay for soldiers that weren't there etc. And soldiers that just weren't motivated and were basically on a jobs program.

The Taliban (and the other groups) have strong charismatic leaders and a group of highly motivated fighters.

Equipping a a group of 3rd world soldiers with M4/M16s instead of the perfectly capable (and much more suitable) AK is a straight up defense contractor money making fraud. Same thing with blackhawks. That's an expensive aircraft to fly and maintain, it would have required maintenance contractors for the life of the program. There may not be enough UH1s available to supply them with, but a similar airframe with it's easy maintenance and low costs would have still given a huge advantage to the Afghan forces. Gen 2 night vision is cheaper, more plentiful, and still gives a huge advantage.

A Combined Arms doctrine, was only going to work with our support, but was overkill on the tools needed.

I don't know how you fix the motivation (lack thereof) of the soldiers.



You make great points here. Equipping the Afghans with much more rugged and simpler Russian or South African motorized equipment along with mortars makes more sense than our high maintenance equipment. Add to that some very simple helicopters equipped with cannon and rockets and some armed drones that the Afghans could handle and they might have a chance. But their weak leadership was absolutely the keystone of failure. Effective company and battalion leadership prevents the unit crumbling under stress.
“If you’re going to have crime it should at least be organized crime”
-Havelock Vetinari
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USAFAg
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In reply to InfantryAg • 1:16p, 9/1/21
AG
InfantryAg said:
I
.

I don't know how you fix the motivation (lack thereof) of the soldiers.




Sure you do. You mentioned it already.

Good officers. Good NCOs. Good leadership. It's why the Taliban are effective and the ANA is not, that and the point that was made that we were training them and equipping them wrongly for the kind of army they needed to be. They just don't have the human capital to be a western-style army and air force.

Been my experience that this is one of the most common and biggest failures in military forces in that region. Haven't dealt with AFG, but with Iraq, Qatar and Saudi.

12thFan/Websider Since 2003
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CT'97
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7:35p, 9/1/21
AG
First hand information from ANA, their average soldiers had not been paid in almost 7 months. Corruption took over as soon as we backed out of the over sight on every day activities like pay and maintenance. Their moral was in the tank as their families were being threatened and in some cases killed with little to nothing being done in response. Add to that not getting paid and it was a house of cards waiting to fall.

I believe our primary failure was not building a tribal based fighting force of the northern tribes to counter the Taliban forces coming from the south. Had we been building this force for that last 20 years, training and equipping it there is no way the Taliban would have taken Kabul so fast. This COA was proposed multiple times by various SOF leaders and was shot down ever time by big Army and State Dept.

What the world will learn soon, and what the Taliban know now, is that the government in Kabul stretches as far as the city limits. Now that the Taliban controls the "government" their power goes no further than the previous government.

The Taliban's base of support is in the south, they will not be able to maintain control of Kabul in any significant way and soon Afghanistan will be a series of Tribal warlords controlling their valley/village etc.
Some of those warlords will band together and make alliances that will stabilize parts of the country, others will in fight and be weak and open to Taliban control.
Texas A&M - 148 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress.
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HollywoodBQ
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In reply to InfantryAg • 11:15p, 9/1/21
AG
Honestly, I was being flippant with my "No" assessment.

Of course we could equip the Afghanis with much less complex equipment that requires less maintenance, easier to use, etc.

Speaking of selling older weapons systems to countries in the Middle East, when I was a kid in Saudi Arabia, all the bank security police and other obviously armed guards at border checkpoints, Haj checkpoints, etc., were all armed with the M3 Grease Gun from WWII.

Around about 1983 or so, they put in a couple of batteries of Hawk missiles in my hometown. I was impressed but my father wasn't. He said, those are really old because we had them in West Germany in the 1960s.

Even if we gave the Afghanis less expensive, less complex weapons, you've still got the organization structure, leadership, education, professionalism, etc.

I think that no matter how they were equipped, they were just never going to get there. Heck, look at Saudi. Arabia. You can't buy your way to an effective military.
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BQ_90
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In reply to CT'97 • 9:24a, 9/2/21
AG
Quote:
I believe our primary failure was not building a tribal based fighting force of the northern tribes to counter the Taliban forces coming from the south. Had we been building this force for that last 20 years, training and equipping it there is no way the Taliban would have taken Kabul so fast. This COA was proposed multiple times by various SOF leaders and was shot down ever time by big Army and State Dept.
So would it have been better to split up the country? Sounds to me like nobody wants Afghanistan but the superpowers. The US seems to love to try nation building in places where people don't want one nation.



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CT'97
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In reply to BQ_90 • 11:20a, 9/2/21
AG
BQ_90 said:
Quote:
I believe our primary failure was not building a tribal based fighting force of the northern tribes to counter the Taliban forces coming from the south. Had we been building this force for that last 20 years, training and equipping it there is no way the Taliban would have taken Kabul so fast. This COA was proposed multiple times by various SOF leaders and was shot down ever time by big Army and State Dept.
So would it have been better to split up the country? Sounds to me like nobody wants Afghanistan but the superpowers. The US seems to love to try nation building in places where people don't want one nation.



I don't think we could have split the country directly, but creating an effective balancing force against the Taliban and their support from the south would have been a mechanism to at least prevent total Taliban control.

Afghanistan has never truly lived under a central government. Your statement about only the superpowers caring about Afghanistan was true even at it's origins when the British and Russians established the country in the late 1800's to create a buffer between their two empires. In doing so they merged several historically racially diverse groups under one flag. This also divided the Pashto and the original Balochistan in half and is the origins of the ungoverned boarder regions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those tribes don't recognize the boarder or the governments because they never wanted to divide their tribal boundaries originally. Look up the Durand line and start reading.
Texas A&M - 148 years of tradition, unimpeded by progress.
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InfantryAg
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In reply to BQ_90 • 11:30a, 9/2/21
AG
BQ_90 said:
Quote:
I believe our primary failure was not building a tribal based fighting force of the northern tribes to counter the Taliban forces coming from the south. Had we been building this force for that last 20 years, training and equipping it there is no way the Taliban would have taken Kabul so fast. This COA was proposed multiple times by various SOF leaders and was shot down ever time by big Army and State Dept.
So would it have been better to split up the country? Sounds to me like nobody wants Afghanistan but the superpowers. The US seems to love to try nation building in places where people don't want one nation.
Definitely better to split up the country.

It's not a real country to begin with, it was created by the Brit diplomat Durand. The Pashtun's areas (pashtunistan) are in reality, a separate country. IMO this is the first reason why we were not successful in Afghanistan.

Even within Pashtunistan, the tribal system is strong. The Taliban united it by using the tribal system.

I thought this was Petraus's strategy and we were mildly successful with it. The problem is this only works while you are physically there as a ruling entity, so it was never a good long term strategy for us.
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