Putting steel on target is a platoon-level task, not a combined-arms operation requiring years and years of experience.Ĭompounding these problems, of course, is the free flow of fighters, weapons, drugs and money across the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border. To be sure, graduates get additional training and increase their proficiency somewhat under the supervision of squad leaders once they get to their units. The folks at Fort Sill, Oklahoma can take a private right out of basic training and turn him into a fully competent 13-Bravo cannon crewmember in five weeks, four days. Unlike technical intelligence, medical proficiency and special operations-all skills that take years of expensive training to master-putting rounds down range and on target is pretty basic stuff. The deficit that jumped out at me, as a former field-artillery officer, was "fire support." Toolan noted that American forces can put artillery on target with amazing accuracy and, well, their Afghan counterparts can’t. It’s another gap that will need to be filled by NATO for the foreseeable future. While the ANA has a fair number of commandos, they're not yet able to conduct complex operations integrated with conventional forces. Third, special forces have been crucial to the successes against the Taliban spoken of by Toolan. Naturally, that means NATO will need to provide it. The Afghans have none of that capability and are not even in the process of developing it. Soldiers receive immediate field medicine and can be Medevaced to a top-flight surgical facility within an hour. Second, the Afghan mission currently enjoys the finest military medical support the world has ever known. This is not unexpected they're very advanced, enormously expensive tools to acquire. So, naturally, NATO will still need to provide that. While Toolan went out of his way to praise the toughness of the Afghan infantry soldiers and marvel at their skill at human intelligence (which apparently doesn't extend to ferreting out members of their own ranks who want to kill Americans, alas) he allowed that "there will be things left after 2014 that will continue to support the Afghan security forces." As he continued to explain, that list got pretty long.įirst and foremost, the Afghans have no real technical capabilities to gather and analyze their own nonhuman intelligence.
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