First afghan army test fail

[Takhisis]

I have no doubt in my mind that you are incapable of this outside of HALO or MW2 as well.

I don't play either game. I do play a bit of CS now and then but I am perfectly aware of the difference between a game and RL. (How many turns has it taken me to write this?)
Now, cav scout got the question right. No one can be expected to shoot two shots at exactly the same spot, but from some of those reports they appear to hit anything except whatever they're really shooting at.

In any case, why is it news that an brand new army participating in independant ops for the first time with little experiance has a poor showing? Its like making fun of your kid for sucking the first time you put him on the ball field.

Also, the metric for failure used is ridiculous. 10 killed out of a battalion is supposed to be a route? thats like 1% casualties. That type of metric is still ridiculous to apply to Western forces, but to apply them to essentially a third world army is patently ridiculous.

I agree, 1% casualties isn't very much, even if every life lost is a tragedy.
The article continues

Spoiler :

A senior Obama administration official said: ''[The] argument is that while we've been in Afghanistan for nine years, only in the past 12 months or so have we started doing this right, and we need to give it some time and think about what our long-term presence in Afghanistan should look like.''

The Afghan army operation began when a battalion of about 300 men from the 201st Army Corps entered a village called Bad Pakh, in Laghman province, on August 3 to flush out Taliban in a rugged area where they had long held sway.

But, according to a high-ranking official from the Afghan Ministry of Defence, the plan was betrayed and Taliban forces were waiting with an ambush. A supporting Afghan army airborne detachment was cut off when bad weather grounded its helicopters.

An official of the Red Crescent in the area said that casualties were very heavy on the government side and that the Taliban had destroyed 35 Ford Ranger trucks, the standard Afghan army vehicle, which typically carry six or more soldiers each.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Kabul, Bijan Frederic Farnoudi, confirmed reports that the group had tried to recover bodies but had been turned back because the fighting was too intense.

A tribal elder, a former Taliban official who has switched to the government side, said the Taliban contacted him to arrange for the Red Cross to remove the dead.

Maybe they were being encircled or something? A map could come in handy.

btw have you arrived at the Mid-East yet, Pat?

If by "same spot" you mean shooting a tight enough shot group at 50 meters to properly zero... my experience 3 years ago was 90% of them could not (or would not).

The reasons were many and excedingly frustrating. The two main reasons were the quality of the training and culture.

I don't have the time to get into how messed up the training was. But it basically boils down to woefully insufficient resources and the policy of quantity over quality taken to a ridiculous extreme (back when I was there the only metric that mattered was warm bodies in a uniform).

Culturally... well education is basically non-existant over there. Just explaining the concept of lining up the rear and front sights was too much for many of them to wrap their minds around. Oh and there is actually a cultural belief that you don't really have to aim, if God wills your bullets to strike someone then they will- inshallah.

You have a lot of people whose brains are stuck somewhere in the eighth century with 21st century weapon technology. Oh the horror…

 

[cav scout]

What primarily motivates the recruits in the Afghan Army?

Money.

The concept of serving/defending your country doesn't really apply so much since people there generally don't think of themselves primarily as "Afghans." Loyalty and self-identitification is based more on ethnic and clan lines.

There is also a bit of prestige associated with the army since they are considered the least corrupt manifestation of the national govt.

 

[Patroklos]

Thats not entirely true. There are enthnic groups in Afghanistan who have decided that contributing to the Army and thus having a measure of control over it is in their best interests, and clans/elders provide manpower for that purpose.

 

[cav scout]

Thats not entirely true. There are enthnic groups in Afghanistan who have decided that contributing to the Army and thus having a measure of control over it is in their best interests, and clans/elders provide manpower for that purpose.

Well of course, the Hazaras immediately come to mind. By the time I was there all the northern alliance or other veteran types were already in uniform. So we were mostly getting young kids with little motivation.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Oh, and I spent a year training the Afghan National Army so feel free to ask me anything guys.

What's the degree (rough percentage) of Pashtun membership in the ANA?

 

[cav scout]

Roughly 40%. There is a concious effort to ethnically balance each group of initial entry trainees to reflect the same ethnic percentages of the country as a whole. All the classes have to be taught twice, once in dari and once in pashtun.