Divided Responsibility: Lessons From U.S. Security Sector
Assistance Efforts in Afghanistan

Instead, the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission relies on command directives and orders to provide overarching guidance and less formal mechanisms, such as weekly operations and intelligence briefings between Resolute Support and USFOR-A, to coordinate military activities.

This has resulted in disjointed efforts to develop ANDSF capabilities.

While international working groups and coordination boards have been created to resolve conflicts, they are often temporary and lack authority.

As a result, critical aspects of the advisory mission were not unified by a common purpose, nor was there a clear plan to guide equipping decisions over time.

Responsibilities for developing ANDSF capabilities were divided among multiple agencies and services, each of which provided advisors who were usually deployed for no longer than one year.

Training did not expose advisors to Afghan systems, processes, weapons, culture, and doctrine. It also did not expose advisors to other parts of the advisory efforts, nor did it link advisors who operated at different tactical, operational, and ministerial levels.

For the last decade and a half, the United States failed to implement—in coordination with Afghan leadership and NATO partners—a stable and comprehensive ANDSF force design that would guide the long-term structure of the U.S. advisory effort. Without a long-term plan that detailed desired operational capabilities, equipping decisions were often ad hoc and inconsistent from year to year. Commanders serving one-year rotations prioritized the tactical fight and equipped the ANDSF with little regard for past equipping decisions or future expenses.

Traditional SSA missions are under the purview of the U.S. ambassador, and reflect overarching goals of U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. Security Coordination Office, as a member of the U.S. Embassy country team, coordinates security sector assistance proposals with the embassy and combatant command. Any agreed-upon activities are then implemented by DOD. In Afghanistan, Resolute Support operates independently of the U.S. ambassador and other international organizations involved in developing Afghanistan’s security capabilities, which hinders interagency coordination. The senior U.S. military commander reports back through the Combatant Command to the Secretary of Defense, with no responsibility for coordinating activities with the U.S. Embassy or ambassador. Instead, coordination among the most senior military commander and civilian representative is based on personalities and the initiative of both actors. Traditional SSA activities are a longer-term commitment than the deployment of U.S. military combat forces. Identifying a transition of responsibility of SSA activities from DOD to the U.S. Embassy is critical to sustaining U.S. foreign policy objectives.

While a NATO command improved coordination among military advisors, embassies and international organizations continued to pursue individual SSA activities. The United States and coalition partners suffer from a lack of civilian-military coordination: Its military component serves as a member of the NATO-led coalition, while its embassy communicates directly with the Afghan government. Embassy coordination of SSA efforts among allies is based on informal working groups, coordination committees, or personal relationships, which have had various levels of success.

After 9/11, Congress created new authorities for DOD to provide military equipment to partner nations that did not have the institutional infrastructure within the ministries to make requests themselves (for example, Iraq and Afghanistan). Under this new authority, known as the pseudo FMS process, the United States generates the requirement for equipment, fills the requirement, and finances the requirement for the partner nation. While the pseudo FMS process was a successful tool to rapidly equip the ANDSF in the early years, CSTC-A did not include Afghans in the pseudo FMS process and has not detailed a transition plan for the Afghan military to gradually assume ownership of the requirements generation process.

The U.S. government continues to provide close to $5 billion a year in security sector assistance to Afghanistan. Even as the ANDSF becomes less reliant on day-to-day U.S. military support, projected financial support to sustain the ANDSF remains steady. Until the Afghan government can reduce the pace of military operations through a political settlement or increase the Afghan government’s ability to increase revenue through taxes and trade, the ANDSF’s sustainability will be fully reliant on international financial support.

DOD efforts to institutionalize security sector assistance programs suffered from high levels of personnel turnover, short-term rotations, and a failure to develop a cadre of advisors with regional and functional expertise. In 2009, DOD created the MODA program to improve the U.S. advisory effort at the ministerial level by recruiting civilian experts. The MODA program is a staffing function to recruit civilians from other DOD agencies to deploy on assignment to target countries. Institutional memory depends upon the individual advisor’s commitment to multiple deployments, as well as that civilian’s home agency’s approval for continued assignments.

In 2017, the U.S. Army created SFABs as a means to institutionalize tactical- and operational-level advising. While the brigades will remain a tool for the U.S. Army, personnel assigned to these units will regularly rotate out of the SFAB structure and into different non-SSA assignments. This will hinder institutional memory, specific regional expertise, and the personal relationships required to build rapport with the host nation. The 1st SFAB is scheduled to lose over 300 personnel after its first tour in Afghanistan. A major reason for high turnover of military advisors is that the positions are not considered career enhancing.

Military and civilian advisors frequently emphasized that they were not selected based on professional background, did not receive adequate training and exposure to Afghan military systems and equipment, and did not receive adequate training on how to be an effective advisor. Without this knowledge, advisors spent the first several weeks and months learning how the ANDSF fights and governs. This limited advisors’ ability to have an immediate impact. A point raised repeatedly during after-action reviews is that advisors were selected based on their specialized expertise, but did not have the personality or skills needed to transfer this knowledge to their counterparts. Expertise in U.S. systems might not translate to the partner nation, and even advisors with considerable expertise may lack the personality and skills needed to transfer this knowledge to their counterparts.

Advisors in Afghanistan were typically senior officers, noncommissioned officers, and civilians with experience governing military and security forces. In 2010 and 2011, the U.S. Army suffered from a shortage of majors and lieutenant colonels within the service at the same time the need for advisors at these ranks increased. For civilian experts, Congress authorized Schedule A hiring authority that allowed MODA to temporarily hire civilians with skills needed by DOD. However, Schedule A was rescinded in FY 2014, forcing the program to rely on volunteers from DOD agencies. DSCA told SIGAR that because the program is suffering without its hiring authority, MODA is “currently exploring the use of temporary billets to source hard-to-fill MODA requirements.” In 2018, MODA was unable to fully staff its positions without special hiring authority.

Starting around 2005, DOD recognized capability gaps in the newly developed ANDSF, and began considering ways to upgrade the ANA’s armored, mobility, and firepower capabilities. This expansion in capabilities included plans for a future Afghan air capability and special operations forces. However, these decisions provided the ANDSF with systems the Afghans government could not afford to maintain. An alternative to this approach would be to conduct an analysis of the capabilities the ANDSF will be required to sustain for the long term, versus capabilities the United States will provide to counter the threat in the short term.

Since 2003, the United States has implemented various command-and-control structures intended to synchronize the advisory mission. At times, the U.S. military command responsible for the train, advise, assist, and equip mission (CSTC-A) established internal command organizations responsible for overseeing the advisory mission assigned to the support the Afghan military or police. From 2003 to 2009, these organizations had command and control over advisors from the ministerial level to the tactical embedded teams, and therefore had oversight over all train, advise, assist, and equip efforts. In 2009, the U.S. military shifted its field advising mission to operational command; as a result, command and control of the ministerial and field advising missions was split.

OSD-Policy, as one of the lead DOD organizations responsible for oversight and management of security cooperation programs, should lead the interagency review. As the United States determines its long-term military presence in Afghanistan, the U.S. military should draft a transition plan detailing how the United States will move from its current footprint to a long-term steady state posture. The plan will need to factor in future decisions on whether the United States will continue to train, advise, and assist the ANDSF as part of a larger international coalition, as it is today, or if the United States will transition to a more traditional security assistance approach under the U.S. Embassy. Because international and interagency coordination challenges can occur under both scenarios, the plan should include interagency coordination strategies that clearly define the roles and responsibilities of agencies, based on assessments of core competencies and capabilities. The final plan should identify when and under what conditions such a plan would begin, and should identify clear stages for the plan to progress.

USFOR-A should take lead for this action as the primary U.S. military command in Afghanistan. Some of the United States’ SSA activities depend on the U.S. military’s presence in Afghanistan. Reducing the number of U.S. troops may put these U.S.-funded programs at risks. For example, as of this report’s writing, the UH-60 Black Hawk aviation program relies on a U.S. or international security force presence at Kandahar Air Field for follow-on training for Afghan pilots. At all major airfields in Afghanistan, air readiness relies heavily on contractor logistic support and a security presence for those contractors. Since the U.S. Army SFABs were designed to be fully dependent on the TAACs for logistical sustainment, airlift, and combat enablers, any reduction in capabilities at the TAACs will have a direct impact on the SFAB’s level of support to ANA units.

The U.S. advisory mission has not been standardized. Each military commander has the authority to independently modify the U.S. advisory posture within his or her area of operations. Moreover, there is no standard method for determining how their deployed personnel are tasked to advise the ANDSF. Methods not only vary by country, but also by military service. For example, one U.S. Army unit organized its police advisors to resemble a police department, with an investigations team and administrative team, while a different U.S. Army unit in another part of Afghanistan organized its police advisory mission along the lines of a military command. In western Afghanistan, the Italian Carabinieri train the ANP to do community policing, while U.S. military personnel train the ANP elsewhere to conduct counterinsurgency operations. Some advisors embed and partner with ANDSF units on operations; others advise from the confines of international bases. Implementing various and at times contradictory advisory models hinders unity of effort.

Despite the prioritization of the security assistance mission in 2015, command-and-control relationships at the tactical and operational level continue to report through military operational channels (Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations) and not through security assistance leadership (the dual-hatted Deputy Chief of Staff for Security Assistance and commander of CSTC-A). While embedded advisors are responsible for guiding ANDSF leaders in executing their operational plan, advisors’ primary mission remains developing ANDSF capabilities—a core tenant of security assistance. Restructuring the TAACs, regional task forces, and SFABs under the security assistance umbrella will improve coordination and synchronization between advisors at the ministerial and operational level.

Over the past 15 years, the force design for the ANDSF has dramatically changed. In 2018 alone, the Afghan National Civil Order Police and Afghan Border Police were moved from the MOI to the MOD. Additionally, the Afghan government has expressed an intent to double the size of its Special Forces and air force at the risk of ANA and ANP development. Ownership of the agreed-upon force design should be maintained at the Pentagon and at the Afghan MOD. In-country commands, like CSTC-A, should be responsible only for the implementation of the plan, and should not be empowered to create and modify plans, based on past practices of ad hoc equipping decisions. Constant changes to the size, composition, or mission of ANDSF elements and ministerial offices makes it harder for the United States to properly align security sector assistance activities with mission requirements. As part of this review, the ANDSF’s current tashkil should be validated and modified accordingly. Such a review could take place during the biannual Afghanistan Program Management Review.

In 2009, the Joint Staff created the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordination Cell to help the U.S. commander in Afghanistan coordinate and optimize military operations and build relationships between the Pentagon and forward elements. As an effective tool for coordination, an element similar in focus and staff would benefit the security cooperation mission. The Security Cooperation Coordination Cell should have responsibility for four mission essential tasks: (1) maintaining a common advising picture of who is doing what, where, and why; (2) coordinating the U.S. advisory effort for the ANDSF fighting force, Afghan security institutions, and force equipment; (3) evaluating U.S. progress in meeting security cooperation goals; and (4) providing continuity to the mission by offering lessons learned to the forward command element. The Security Cooperation Coordination Cell should be staffed with members of each military service, OSD, DSCA, the combatant command, liaison officers from State and the U.S. Department of Justice, and national representatives from NATO allies. Staff should be assigned at minimum to serve a three-year tour with regular deployments into Afghanistan.

Since the Resolute Support Mission does not have a mandate to coordinate with embassies, nongovernmental organizations, or international governmental organizations, regular conferences will allow all stakeholders in ANDSF development to meet regularly to improve coordination. Information gathered from these conferences would be used by Resolute Support to maintain its common advisory picture, recommended above.

Currently, predeployment training is focused solely on individual tasks the identified advisor will face in Afghanistan, with limited or no training on how that individual’s advisory effort affects the larger security sector assistance mission. This creates a knowledge gap that can prevent advisors from understanding all the options at their disposal in the larger advisory system. Issues can arise from advisors operating at cross purposes, and an uninformed advisor will face extra challenges when attempting to help an ANDSF partner resolve problems.