Humvees in new lease of life

MY STORY TODAY The Humvee became one of the most visible and iconic US military vehicles on the battlefield in the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan and was due to be replaced. However, it seems the Humvee still has legs, and the Pentagon wants to keep it in service and spend millions of dollars on updating it for the next war. Like the US Air Force’s B-52, A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack fighter and U-2 spy plane, the Humvee has a status all of its own in the American military, and the Pentagon wants to persuade Congress to provide the funds. The troop-carrying vehicle that was adapted multiple times to survive in increasingly lethal counter-insurgency conflicts, came into service in 1983 with a long and unmemorable name: high-mobility multi-purpose wheeled vehicle. It wasn’t long before it was known to every soldier as a Humvee . The name stuck and its versatility and ruggedness brought customers from around the world. It also became the trophy vehicle for the Taliban who captured hundreds of them from the Afghan national security forces. There is a programme already underway to replace the Humvee with a new generation joint light tactical vehicle. The acronym JLTV doesn’t have the same ring to it and is not yet ready for operational service. Now the Pentagon has decided to use some of the funds for the JLTV to keep the Humvee alive and well and operationally effective. A request has been made to Congress to approve an additional $36 million to keep the Humvee production line going and upgrade existing ones, of which more than $20 million will come from the JLTV project. The Humvee manufacturer, AM General, based in South Bend, Indiana, produced at least a dozen variants of the vehicle, including a military ambulance and a commercial one for civilian use. As on the battlefield, the civilian version acquired iconic status. The first American to acquire one was Arnold Schwarznegger. In 1990 he was driving to a film set in western Oregon when he overtook a convoy of military vehicles and spotted the Humvee with its cool, muscular body, wide wheelbase, protruding grille, and emitting a growling diesel roar. It perfectly matched his own Hollywood image and he wanted one. He persuaded AM General to produce a commercial model, to be known as the Hummer. He became the proud owner of a $50,000 Hummer in the summer of 1991, and a new craze was launched. The military version wasn’t always a success. When insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan began developing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and armour-piercing grenades, the unarmoured Humvees were suddenly vulnerable. In 2006, as the insurgency in Iraq raged, about 70 US soldiers died when their Humvees were hit by IEDs. The Humvee had not been designed as a combat vehicle and it was hastily armoured to provide more protection for the eight troop passengers. The Humvee made its first appearance in combat in Operation Just Cause, the US invasion of Panama in 1989.

Great Game in Afghanistan still alive and well

The withdrawal of American and coalition troops from Afghanistan will now move into a new period of strategic politics. The Great Game never goes away. This time it's all about the US desperately trying to fix a deal with someone/anyone in the region to enable the Pentagon to have troops on standby across the border in case of an upsurge in al-Qaeda or other terrorist organisation activities. The signs are not looking good because of the huge influence of Russia and China and their clear intention to block any move by the US to station troops in one of the bordering -stan countries - Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. If the Pentagon and State Department fail to persuade any of these countries to host American forces, there will be no alternative but to rely on the bases in Qatar, UAE and Kuwait and an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea to monitor what is going to happen in Afghanistan over the next few months. If the Taliban does advance to the edge of Kabul and push further in, I seriously doubt they will do anything to curb the activities of al-Qaeda whatever their negotiators promised in Qatar with the Americans. If al-Qaeda rises up again in Afghanistan - with the blessing of the Taliban - then the US will be even more desperate to get special forces onto a base across the border, ready to pile in when required. Doing it from Qatar would require greater logistics, more time and a comprehensive intelligence picture. Not out of the question but just more complex. The heavy hand of Russia and China will probably ensure that the US will fail to persuade any -stan country to host anything branded American. Uzbekistan is a possibility but it relies too much on Russia, and China will do everything in its power, diplomatically and strategically, to keep US troops out of the region. It's going to be a messy business and as with all previous versions of the Great Game, it's not going to end in peace and stability, let alone joy and optimism for the Afghan people.

A 4th of July weekend of shootings

It's somewhat difficult to fathom but here it is: no US soldiers were killed battle in Afghanistan since February 2020. But over the 4th of July weekend just gone more than 150 Americans were killed in 400 shooting incidents across the country. A quite staggering figure. So to put it bluntly, since the signing of the "peace" deal between the US and the Taliban at the end of February last year, it has been more dangerous for Americans back home than being in a war zone in Afghanistan. The death of 150 people is the equivalent of a large company in the US Army. I wonder if anyone raised this with President Biden as he was trying to be happy and optimistic over the weekend. According to CNN there were 83 shootings in Chicago alone, with 14 deaths. Fatal shootings are so regular in the United States that may be there is a degree of complacency about such statistics, although I'm sure the deaths were all devastating for the families involved. It has been said a million times but there are just too many guns in too many hands in the US. Fourth of July should have been a time to celebrate and to be proud of America's independence but it seems it was also a time of violence and brutal deaths. When will America learn?

Too many Afghanistan doom warnings!

I know it looks bad. The Taliban are going whoopee and advancing across Afghanistan, seizing districts so easily you wonder what the hell all those armed Afghan national security troops are doing for their wages, paid incidentally by the Pentagon. Well, they're running away in droves. So much for all those years of training. Anyway that's not what I'm on about. What I do get fed up with are all the people, military, spooks and others who played their part in the 20-year war one way or another and are now retired and are saying what a disaster it all was and what a terrible disaster it still is and how it's all going to go downhill into the black depths in the next few months when all foreign troops, especially the Americans, have vanished. Sir Alex Younger, retired chief of MI6 or the British secret intelligence service, is the latest to come out of the woodwork and accuse the West of getting it all wrong and failing to build a decent democratic nation and failing to get rid of the Taliban. Ok, fine but he was head of the British spooks, including the very large MI6 station in Kabul, from 2014 to 2020, a key period in the attempted nation-building programme after the combat phase had ended. Of course it's not his fault that Afghanistan remains a nation in crisis, but he was there among the top people making decisions and recommendations. Did he during that time warn everyone that we were heading down the wrong road and, if so, did no one listen? I listened to literally hundreds of different military commanders talking about Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021, embedded with military units as they took on the Taliban, interviewed aid workers, health workers, NGOs and local Afghans all over the place and none of them thought the US-led coalition was going to win a great victory over the Taliban and turn the country into a cross between North Dakota and the garden of England (the county of Kent). The only message I got from the military whether generals or majors or captains or sergeants was that they were makng progress and holding back the Taliban. That was it. All the finest military brains in the business were hard at it and none of them seemed to grasp the simple fact that the Taliban are Afghans and therefore they were never going to go away. They believed and still believe, they had a legitimate cause and an entitlement to political power like any other Afghan faction and were prepared to fight for it. So foreign troops occupying large chunks of what they say is their land were never going to win. So don't come weepng tears now after it is all over and complain that it should have been done differently. There wasn't a different way, other than not doing it at all. What was totally wrong was to send 130,000 American and coalition troops to sort out the country. It was never going to happen and all those who thought it was possible, especially those now whingeing about the disaster ahead, should in my view accept some of the responsibility and admit the mega mistakes made over 20 years.

Donald Rumsfeld, the charming warrior

Much has already been written about Donald Rumsfeld since his death a few days ago, a lot of it blaming him for the US decision to invade Iraq. My memories of him are purely personal. He was without doubt quite a character and above all he had charm and what I can only describe as a Hollywood-style swagger. I first came across him in Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan in December 2003. I was on an early assignment in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban in 2001. Everything was new to me. I had travelled up to Mazar-e Sharif because the British had a provincial reconstruction team up there, working with the locals to try and improve conditions and security. The base was a dusty old outpost off a long road that seemed to go from nowhere to nowhere. While I was there I was told in confidence that Donald Rumsfeld was due to visit the base during a 24-hour trip to Afghanistan. What he could learn in such a short time I don't know but that was the plan. I was at the base hours before he was supposed to arrive. The British soldiers and civilians were primed for the super VIP. I will always remember the first sighting. Way off in the distance there was a massive dust storm building up. Something was moving fast and furious across the desert road and heading for the British base which, incidentally, also had some American troops around. The dust storm got closer and closer, in fact quite rapidly so. And suddenly a convoy of heavy-duty limousines and trucks and God knows what skidded to a halt outside the base and the dust and sand swirled and swirled high up into the air. A rear door of the third limousine opened and outstepped Tom Cruise.... well no it was Donald Rumsfeld in a suit but it was almost as glamorous. He came, he spoke, he inspired the soldiers to great victories and left. The dust eventually settled. The great cavalcade carrying the US defence secretary with the Hollywood looks had moved on.

Farewell Afghanistan

A FULLER VERSION OF MY TIMES STORY TODAY: America’s Great Exit from Afghanistan is now approaching the endgame. It’s not just about troops withdrawing. It’s also about 20 years’ worth of accumulated paraphernalia vital for the sustainment and survival of a superpower force confronting a resilient and well-armed insurgency. The American military footprint, human and structural, is being reduced to zero. Around 900 US Air Force C-17 transport aircraft loads of equipment from armoured vehicles, trucks, highly classified computers and munitions to spare parts for everything , furniture and fast-food stalls, have already been flown out of the country. So far, more than 16,000 separate pieces, most of them now “non-defensive articles”, as the Pentagon puts it, have been extracted. What the US created over 20 years was a vast empire of warfighting support structures that in many cases changed the landscape of once primitive areas of Afghanistan. With the war and training mission officially over, it’s now all about completing a “retrograde” programme which is how the Pentagon describes it. As with the wars against Iraq in 1991 and 2003, the logistics kings of the US military divide up the huge tonnage of materiel deployed for a conflict into three categories: “First, must be sent home. Second, can be left for the host country to use. Third, no longer needed or obsolete but too sensitive to give away or against US law to do so, therefore trashed and turned into scrap metal”. “Retrograde requires a full inventory of equipment which is a complex operation due to the amount, variety, condition and sensitivity. The fate of the equipment is assessed after it’s inventoried,” Lieutenant Commander Karen Roxberry of US Central Command said. Afghan Del Boys have had their eyes on making a small fortune with the scrap but have watched with dismay as the Americans destroyed perfectly good vehicles which they could have sold. But the US which lost dozens of Humvee armoured vehicles and other military kit captured by the Taliban over 20 years would rather turn such valuable assets into twisted metal than risk them being bought on the market by the insurgents. The first US soldiers to arrive in Afghanistan, a dozen Green Berets from 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) who set foot on Afghan soil in October 2001 after flying from Uzbekistan over the Hindu Kush mountains, resorted to riding horses when they teamed up with the Northern Alliance to take on the Taliban. Their mission was codenamed Task Force Dagger. They joined a CIA paramilitary team, codenamed Jawbreaker, which had arrived on September 26. It was warfighting at its most primitive. But over the next few years as mass troop reinforcements built up to a peak of 100,000 US personnel, it was not just American forces residing across the length and breadth of Afghanistan, supported by thousands of Nato and other coalition troops. They brought mini-Americas with them. Kandahar, a huge airfield in the south, was a classic case. “They built a boardwalk with coffee shops, McDonalds, Burger Kings, even TGI Fridays, “ Seth Jones, a longstanding adviser to US special forces in Afghanistan, told The Times. “When Canadian troops arrived at Kandahar they built a hockey rink and we played against them.” “Now no more McDonalds, no more Burger Kings, no more TGI Fridays. It was like a fast-food mirage in the desert and it’s all gone,” he said. To underline the impact a large-scale foreign conventional force had on Afghanistan, you only have to look at the statistics following the first retrograde programme carried out in 2013 and 2014 when the US and Nato combat phase of the war came to an end. By then the US military had 11,000 huge mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPS) to evacuate. Nine thousand were repatriated and 2,000, judged to be surplus to requirement, were destroyed. It took around 12 hours with a special blowtorch to turn each $1 million vehicle into scrap. The 2014 exit of heavy armour was the largest retrograde operation in history, with 24,000 pieces of rolling stock shipped back to the US. Today, everything is being dismantled at a rapid rate. Bases which had housed thousands of US and coalition troops are being handed over as empty shells with destroyed equipment lying around - permanent mementoes of what was once a great endeavour by the western world to bring peace, stability, human rights and modern thinking to a country gripped by tribal war lordism, a fanatical insurgent militia, international terrorists and corruption. Were lessons learned from this experiment in nation-building? “I think for the American military who served in Afghanistan there is currently a feeling of detachment. But it will really hit home if there’s an advance by the Taliban on major cities such as Kandahar, Jalalabad and Kunduz where US troops fought and died to protect,” said Jones who spent 12 years advising special forces in Afghanistan, both in the field and at the Pentagon. “I don’t think people will fully appreciate what the end of the mission means until they see Taliban flags flying over these cities,” he said. “What will we do if the Taliban expands its control over the country? The Afghans may then fracture in which case the war will continue and the US will have to decide who to back. Then it will be like the US backing an insurgency against the Taliban rather than being involved in counter-insurgency against them,” he said. “But the US footprint will be different, it will be done from the Persian Gulf and from carriers and it will be like returning to 2001 when the CIA and special forces deployed to Afghanistan. The US has now learned this lesson [after 20 years], you don’t deploy large numbers of conventional forces,” he said. Andrew Krepinevich who spent 20 years as an officer in the US army and served in the private office of three secretaries of defence, agreed. “We need to avoid getting caught in these kind of wars. But we will need to maintain a baseline level of training proficiency in these sort of operations.” “So, always have special operations forces aiding allied partner countries confronting insurgencies or large-scale terrorism to pass along what we’ve learned and to stay current on changes in enemy tactics; and figure out how to expand this capability quickly and effectively,” he said. “It could be a tall order but let’s hope we have political leaders who can think strategically,” he said.

Don't ask Biden about the war

Afghanistan is going to be Joe Biden's Achilles Heel. OK it was actually Donald Trump who ordered America's involvement in the war to be brought to an end and instituted peace talks with the Taliban. But it's now Biden's administration, so he has to take the rough with the smooth, and he doesn't like the rough, not when it comes in the form of questions from impertinent reporters who want to know what he is going to do if the Afhgan government collapses and there's a raging slaughter in the next few weeks. Biden replied that he wasn't holding a press conference to answer negative - sorry, he said later, he meant to say legitimate - questions about Afghanistan. It was about to be July 4th,the great American celebration holiday and he wanted everyone to be happy and nice and optimistic about everything because everything (else) was going so well. Like the increase in jobs and the vaccination programme etc. Poor Joe, he can't stand it when he rolls out all the good news and then the first question is about the dire situation in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, Mr President, that's the way it works. Reporters can be a pain in the whatsit but actually a question about Afghanistan on the day when it was announced that the huge Bagram airfield no longer had American troops there was wholly relevant, never mind the jobs figures and the vaccine record. July 4th or not the president has a duty to tell the American public what he thinks and fears about the biggest decision he has made so far in his presidency - to stick with Trump's policy of getting out of Afghanistan and removing every piece of materiel and equipment put into that country over two decades. It wasn't a negative question he was asked, it was a realistic one. He will have to deal with the political consequences if Afghanistan is overrun by murdering, slaughtering insurgents and militia. Not a good prospect for the Afghan people or for the US military who made so many sacrifices over 20 years of war.