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Army building Afghan logistics from ‘scratch’

MARJAH, Afghanistan — The Army three-star charged with training Afghanistan’s military is tired of hearing how the Afghan army’s supply chain is broken.

“It’s hard to break something that’s not built,” said Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell, head of NATO Training Mission–Afghanistan (NTMA).

Even the basics, such as distributing food, water, boots and fuel to Afghan units, remain a struggle for the Afghan army’s logistics system, U.S. officers here said. Coalition trainers have had to start from scratch when standing up a logistics system for the Afghan military and police force. Only the most senior Afghan soldiers — ones who served when the Soviets invaded — remember the Afghan military having any semblance of a national supply chain.

Making it even harder, only 14 percent of the Afghan Army recruits can read or count, making the simplest tasks such as counting rifles impossible for most new enlistees, Caldwell said.

“Logistics is probably the most complicated thing an army does because there are a lot of different pieces that have to come together for a logistics system to work,” said Col. John Ferrari, NTMA’s deputy commander for programs.

In Iraq, U.S. troops saw firsthand how long it takes to rebuild a military’s supply chain. Simply creating and lining shelves won’t suffice. Training soldiers to run the system, and eliminating such bad habits as waiting for parts to run out, takes time to reverse.

“One of the lessons we learned from Iraq was that we probably started too late,” Ferrari said. “They had a lot less time than they thought to develop the logistics system. They started late, thought they would have a lot more time, and then the drawdown came, and they ran out of time.”

NTMA will get help in December, when a U.S. Army brigadier general will bring a logistics headquarters unit of about 200 logisticians to Afghanistan. It’s the first time in either Iraq or Afghanistan a headquarters unit led by a U.S. one-star has been deployed solely to stand up a foreign army’s logistics system, Ferrari said.

Caldwell and other NTMA leaders worry that the coalition is already off to a late start. Caldwell said he hopes coalition trainers will have the time they need to establish the logistics system and work out the kinks before U.S. forces plan to leave in 2014. He can hear the rumblings from U.S. congressmen ready to pull out troops ahead of the 2014 schedule, especially after Osama bin Laden’s death.

In May, Caldwell sent a team to Iraq to learn about the Iraqi military’s supply chain and how coalition forces can more efficiently stand up the Afghanistan National Security Forces logistics directorate.

“You cannot wait until transition, as you must have time and adequate oversight to develop the [logistics] system, test the system and sustain the system. This affords the necessary time to correct and modify the system based on the challenges of the operating environment and conditions on the ground,” Caldwell said.

Basic Training

Unlike in Iraq, trainers here contend with rampant illiteracy.

Not until 2009 did the coalition start teaching recruits to read and write when enlisting in the Afghanistan National Security Forces. Now Afghan recruits receive up to a U.S. first grade education in basic training. Those selected to enter logistics training receive extra reading and math classes equivalent to a U.S. third-grader, Ferrari said.

Until a year ago, specialized logistics training didn’t exist for Afghan soldiers. It was one of 12 branch or vocational schools stood up to further establish soldier skills in such fields as finance, human resources, artillery and engineering.

Many of the Combat Service Support kandaks — an Afghan unit equivalent to a U.S. Army battalion — have troops without any of this specialized training. Ferrari said the coalition plans to field mobile training teams to go to these kandaks and provide the training new recruits now receive.

“For all the right reasons, because we are trying to build an Afghan army and police in the middle of a war, a decision was made to field a lot of the combat forces and uniformed police forces first over the years. The logistics were deferred until about now,” Ferrari said.

Trainers have to teach more than skills, too. They have to erase bad habits worked into an army that hasn’t had a formal logistics system in three decades. Hoarding is one of the hardest. For many years, soldiers couldn’t count on consistent resupply, so it’s hard for them to pass on supplies to other units, Ferrari said.

Logistics officers never had to consider consumption rates before, said U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Aldrick Blunt, the officer in charge of the adviser team mission here for 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines.

Blunt is working with logistics officers with the 5th Combat Service Support Kandak at Camp Marjah to teach them to predict when supplies will run out and when to order new ones.

“We’ve done a lot in the areas of logistics, so they understood how to push support down to their companies,” Blunt said. “The challenge for them is understanding consumption rates.”

Red Tape

Ordering is tough enough. Even by U.S. Army standards, Afghans have too much bureaucracy built into their ordering process, requiring what Ferrari said seems like 13 or 14 signatures to order something as basic as a tire.

Most U.S. logistics officers wouldn’t recognize the logistics system the NTMA is installing into Afghanistan. It will be a paper based system, not an automated computer system.

“Unless you were in back in 1985, you’re not going to recognize it,” Ferrari said. “But it’s not about us, because we’re going to leave. It’s about learning their rules and regulations and putting in a system they want and they can keep.”

The U.S. colonel likes to compare the Afghan army and police’s logistics system to a highway. Parts of the system, or highway, exist, or the Afghans wouldn’t be able to continue to fight against the Taliban as they have for the past 10 years, Ferrari said.

“But it’s missing some of the overpasses and underpasses ... and they haven’t cut through the mountain yet, so it just ends and you can’t get to the other side,” he said. “So there are pieces of a logistics system out there that people say, ‘Hey, there’s a log system,’ but it’s not working. There’s about half of it out there, but there are key pieces that knit it together which haven’t been built.”

Over the next year or two, Ferrari expects those pieces — such as strong logistics leadership and a distribution system to deliver supplies down to the company level — to develop. But that won’t be enough, he said.

“You have to stay there side by side with them to make sure it grows roots and you change the culture,” he said. “What we learned is, don’t take time for granted. Some people might say you have until 2014 or beyond, but you never know how much time you have, and you probably have less time than you think.”