A sailor surge in Afghanistan?
December 2nd, 2009 | individual augmentees Morale Personnel Seabees Shore duty The Middle East | Posted by Phil Ewing
Could more sailors -- like these Seabees arriving in Helmand Province last winter -- be bound for Afghanistan? // MC2 Michael B. Lavender / Navy
At first blush, it might not seem like the Navy would be much affected by President Obama’s announcement last night that he is sending 30,000 more troops to land-locked Afghanistan by next year. But there are thousands of mountain sailors across Afghanistan, and it seems likely that more could begin deploying there as part of the president’s surge.
In addition to the corpsmen and chaplains assigned to Marine units, Navy individual augmentees work in provincial reconstruction teams; Navy explosive ordnance disposal technicians help get rid of bombs; Seabees build the bases where U.S. troops live. The sailors in Afghanistan come from all over the fleet: In August, Scoop Deck met the former executive officer of the ballistic missile submarine Louisiana, Cmdr. Tim Cauthen, running the show in Paktika Province. One of his officers, Lt. Christine Fix, a helicopter pilot borrowed from Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron 49, the “Scorpions,” had been blown up not once, but twice, by roadside bombs while riding in Mine-Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicles.
“I had a couple of bruises but it was not too bad,” she shrugged.
And last month Scoop Deck had the privilege of meeting another officer with experience in Afghanistan, Lt. Cmdr. James Patton, a reservist from Indianapolis, who described his time helping with civil affairs outside Kandahar in 2006. Patton’s story summed up one of the many unexpected challenges that U.S. forces face in training up Afghan soldiers and police to take over for Americans: Banking.
Patton’s job was to help an Afghan National Army unit disburse pay to its soldiers, he said, and assess how well American money was being used to help support the new army units. But the number of Afghan soldiers who showed up on a given day to drill with their colleagues could fluctuate widely, he said, although there was always a very strong turnout on payday. Then, many soldiers would disappear.
At first, Patton was mystified. Then he realized what was going on: Many Afghan soldiers drilling near Kandahar actually were from the country’s northern provinces, and they were the sole breadwinners for their extended families. With no reliable way for them to transfer money from where they’d earned it to where their families were living, the Afghan troops had to make their way back home to give their families their pay, then would return to their post near Kandahar in time for their next payday. The army made no allowance for this kind of travel — technically the troops who did this were UA, or on an “unauthorized absence,” in Navy parlance — but still they were permitted to keep serving.
“There was very little retribution,” Patton said.
So if, as Obama said, a main goal of the U.S. surge is to put Afghanistan’s security in the hands of its indigenous army and police, an early thing to figure out will be how to keep them paid and keep them in place.