For this Newly Formed Army Unit, the Stakes in Afghanistan Will be High by Dan Lamothe – Washington Post
… As part of the Army’s newly created 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, Mathes and about 800 other military advisers are expected to deploy this spring alongside a few hundred soldiers from the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, who will provide security. The unit will be activated Thursday in a ceremony at Fort Benning, Ga.
The stakes are high. The SFAB could face more danger than any conventional U.S. unit in the war in several years because it is expected to advise and accompany Afghan kandaks, infantry units of a few hundred conventional soldiers, on a regular basis. U.S. troops advised such units during Obama’s surge, but only episodically in recent years.
The soldiers will fan out across the country in small teams, taking pressure off U.S. units that trained Afghan troops for years on an ad hoc basis, to varying degrees of success.
The deployment also will serve as a test case for the SFAB concept, which the Army hopes to expand to include six adviser brigades that could deploy around the world…
Comments
I am just wondering.
The article states.
“As part of the Army's newly created 1st Security Force Assistance Brigade, Mathes and about 800 other military advisers are expected to deploy this spring alongside a few hundred soldiers from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division, who will provide security. The unit will be activated Thursday in a ceremony at Fort Benning, Ga.”
Does this mean the concept has already failed? As this idea was ramped up and executed one of the constant themes was that by doing this conventional Army units could focus on their primary jobs in a near-peer fight. As a result, the DOD did a lot of extra work and spent a lot of money to build separate units so the conventional units would not have to break down their formations or focus on something other than their primary ULO responsibilities. Now the SFAB is going over with manpower and money that could have been put into a conventional unit AND a conventional unit is still going to break down their formations or focus on something other than their primary ULO responsibilities. Would it not have been cheaper and more efficient to send a conventional unit in the first place?
For the training part the SFAB School could have been at Ft. Polk, (there was a SFAT school there before) and the BDE could just do an extra two weeks of training as part of their rotation there. Afterward, they get an ASI and done. Massive reduction in overall cost and no change to CF readiness compared to the system the Army is employing now.
$00.02