"On ANA officers and hope"

Further to this post, more from BruceR at Flit:

Good post from yet another good ETT blog ["embedded tactical trainer" US term] here:

The bright spot is that the younger [ANA] officers I’ve worked with are much better than the older guys. Afghan Army officers basically come in three varieties: the older officers who were Russian-trained or influenced; the former mujahideen fighters/commanders; and the new, younger, American-trained generation. The former mujahideen fighters make pretty good officers and are revered by their men but don’t have the education or formal schooling and don’t listen to advice. The older officers, in the words of my best interpreter, a former ANA 1stSgt, “don’t ever want to leave the base” and have an excuse why they can’t do anything about their problems or act on our suggestions. The new generation of officers is much more willing to do operations, listen to our advice, and make some changes on the fly if need be, although they’re still somewhat afraid to make mistakes. Unfortunately, for now the power lies with that older group of officers. Hopefully, once the younger, American-trained generation comes of age, things will start changing rapidly for the better.

This is obviously every military mentor's hope, too. I'm skeptical. Something I read somewhere about hope and its relation to a plan.

Yes, no question, in the ANA you've got some very promising senior NCOs and lieutenants, some half decent captains and majors, and some truly awful colonels and generals. And that's before the new Western-trained officers from the new Afghan military college started rejoining the army this spring. Old people have to retire some time, so are things not looking up? Maybe this is just a matter of time?

But...

The trouble is that the ANA has systemic issues that are at least somewhat countervailing. To excel in the ANA today you have to have the attributes your superiors respect. At present in the ANA those include familial connections, a tolerance for senior-level graft, and risk aversion. Things useful to us -- like aggressiveness on the battlefield -- are not on their list. So those who rise rapidly in the ranks in the next couple years are going to have to, to some degree, incorporate those attributes, as well. Which doesn't mean they won't gradually get better as the years go by, but we shouldn't expect they'll get better at the same rate their senior officers get replaced, either, because those same senior officers are the ones picking their replacements.

Note also the use of an ex-ANA senior NCO as a terp. That, too, is unfortunately common. The literate and brainy soldiers, by picking up a little English, can go from $100 a month to $600, and still hang with their buds. Which is still helpful, sure: better for us they work with the army than an NGO. System-wide, it does tend to drain talent from the pool, though, and one suspects is acting to limit the number of actual ANA officers and senior NCOs we can converse with directly.