40-year Old Ammunition and the Afghan Army
This is brilliant, damning investigative journalism from C.J. Chivers and the New York Times. Chivers spent several years in the U.S. Marine Corps upon his graduation from Cornell, fought in the Gulf War, and his experience shows whenever he reports on military affairs. This is a must-read report:
Damn... (Also in the Times today, Kaplan on NATO. Abu Muqawama disagrees with his argument, but read it anyway and see if it makes sense to you.)Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials.
7 comments:
Can you elaborate on what you disagree with in Kaplan's article? I think he overstates the ineffectiveness of the NATO militaries, although giving them a larger naval role isn't a bad idea. I also don't get the feeling that Afghanistan is as cut and dried as he makes it: peaceful north and restive south. Any troops in the country will have to fight in some capacity.
So THAT'S where all the milsurp ammo's been going ! No wonder prices have shot up. Typical - the actual war effort gets dreck ammo at ridiculous prices, and US civilian shooters get newly manufactured ammo from Russia or the Balkans... at ridiculous prices.
As soon as BoTach was mentioned in the article, the shadiness made sense. Go to any firearms forum and search, and you'll get an earful from erstwhile customers.
You understand some of this ammunition may be stuff the U.S. paid for twice? First the U.S. paid for it to be destroyed, then again for use by the Afghans?
Kudos to the NYT for this report. It is very difficult for the Army to "blacklist" contractors who fail to perform otherwise.
I disagree strongly with the argument. To me, it doesn't even make sense. The problem is that NATO *isn't* a two-tiered system. I do like what he says about the naval effort (look at CTF 150 off the Horn of Africa and you'll see some interesting stuff) but that kind of proves the fact that NATO isn't a two-tiered system. It's not like half the naval forces are off patrolling the waters that don't have problems and the other half are engaged in the action. Everyone is all across the entire area that NATO has declared it needs to make an effort towards.
In Afghanistan, it's easy to see this isn't the case. If the ISAF mission had been sold as a two-tiered one, where certain nations were made aware from the get go that they were going to have to shoulder a disproportionate burden of the fighting, that would be one thing. But it wasn't, which is the problem.
In fairness to the rest of NATO, European countries do have significant forces deployed on PKOs elsewhere around the world, including 2,500 in EUFOR in the Balkans, 2,700 committed to EUFOR in Chad, about 7,500 on various UN missions (most notably UNIFIL+), and about 4,000 French troops backstopping the UNOCI mission in Côte d'Ivoire.
The Turks might also want to count the several thousand troops who now seem to do periodic visits to northern Iraq/Iraqi Kurdistan ;)
I had heard that half of the AK ammo (7.62x39) manufactured by Wolf Ammo (near bottom of the barrel quality) went directly to the Iraqi security forces. People still shoot Mil Surp ammo from WWI so this stuff can't be all bad.
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