Afghanistan Archives

The Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., has developed a database on Afghanistan to help in managing aid and development projects.

The provincial reconstruction teams that are staffed by Defense Department personnel, diplomats and even farm experts from the Agriculture Department use the database, which includes detailed information on the country's provinces such as lists of key leaders.

But the database is hard to access from remote and unwired areas of Afghanistan. But two students at the postgraduate school solved the problem. They created a smart phone application called Mobile Afghanistan, which includes detailed province-by-province information, including:

--maps
--leaders and presidential candidate profiles
--tribal and clan genealogies, divisions and histories
--economic, cultural and political development analyses
--security incidents and more

Robert Davis and Christopher Joers, both Air Force captains, developed the app as part of a class assignment from their professor, Thomas Johnson, director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies. Johnson dubbed the Davis' and Joers' app, Afghanistan in Your Hand, but Davis calls it, Cliff Notes for Afghanistan.

Mobile Afghanistan is available free on the Culture and Conflict Studies website and includes installation instructions easily understood by someone who does not have an advanced degree.

As anyone who has served in combat knows, if a buddy is wounded, the first two things you need to do are make sure he can breathe and his bleeding is stopped.

For the past several years, troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq have used an advanced Combat-Application-Tourniquet (C-A-T) developed by Composite Resources in Rock Hill, S.C. The tourniquet features a nylon strap and a plastic rod to tighten the strap to stop bleeding.

The regulation C-A-T costs about $28. But about two years ago the Army detected cheap knock offs made by a Hong Kong company that had entered the military's supply chain in Afghanistan and Iraq. The imitation sold for about $8.50.

They're accurate looking fakes, right down to the label and national stock number.

But as Col. John Kragh, a doctor at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research at Fort Sam Houston, pointed out in June, the rod on the fake tourniquet "is bendable to a point where it cannot work right. It's like bending Gumby's arm."

He said the fake tourniquet could be fatal because it cannot stop bleeding. Kragh added a decentralized ordering system probably accounts for the presence of the fake tourniquets in the field, with low-level supply personnel ordering the knock offs over the Internet based on price.

The Defense Department issued a warning about the knock-offs in April, Kragh said, and the Food and Drug Administration this month put out a safety alert about the tourniquets, which are also used by civilian first responders.

The lesson here is a good deal isn't always that; it can even be deadly.

That's one of the best suggestions to come out of Wednesday's Senate Veterans Affairs Committee hearing on the post 9/11 GI bill.

The suggestion came not from the Veterans Affairs Department, but from Marco Reininger, an Army veteran who served in Afghanistan and now a student at Columbia University in New York. He said VA could make it easy for vets to track the progress of their claims by posting a widget on its GI bill website.

He said this would help soothe the frustration that veterans experience when trying to determine the status of their benefit payments.

"If I can never predict when VA [will make] a payment to my school, it is difficult to account for what individual checks are covering my tuition and fees," Reininger told lawmakers. "We need a mechanism that would allow me to track my GI bill claim from the moment I file to the day when it actually pays."

VA should model itself after Amazon.com, he said. "I can track a book from an Amazon.com warehouse to my apartment," he said. "Why can't I get the same transparency from VA?"

Talking this morning with Air Force Maj. Jonathan Kusy, who works with the U.S. military advisory mission in Iraq, I had one of those moments that makes one pause and reflect.

I asked Kusy about his background, which includes three previous tours in Iraq, and he replied that as the son of a first generation American, military service was imbued in him from childhood. Kusy said his father, Joseph, is a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in a concentration camp as a child and after the war in a displaced persons camp.

Joseph moved to Michigan, and when he came of age, joined the Navy, a path Jonathan followed when he enlisted in the Air Force.

Kusy, who serves in the Air Force Security Forces, describes himself as "just a cop," but his career shows he is much more multidimensional than that. As an enlisted man, he spent just more than five years in an Air Force Tactical Aircraft Control Party, which meant he was an Air Force grunt, with three years in the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, N.C., and another two years with the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea. Kusy said these tours provided him a keen appreciation for NCOs he now works with.

Kusy did one tour in Iraq working on force protection issues, and the other two tours on detainee operations. Before deploying once again to Iraq, Kusy served at Yokota Air Force Base in Japan, where, among other things, he commanded the 374th Security Forces Squadron.

Today, Kusy said, he is working to help Iraqi police and security forces get the gear they need to police their country and secure their borders. He said this includes a $2.7 million project to install scanners at four Iraqi airports, much like those used by the Transportation Security Administration, and another $25 million project to install cargo container scanners at Iraq border entry points and its deep water port at Basra.

Kusy said he relishes this tour because it provides him the opportunity to get the "big picture, national strategic level view" of what is going on in Iraq, as well as a chance to see what has changed since his first tour in 2005.

So far Iraq seems to be far safer than in 2005, with a civilian society much like ours, where political debate is carried out in the pages of newspapers, instead of setting off bombs.

I'm glad to know we have troops like Kusy in Iraq, who can bring generations of experience to their tasks.

The Defense Information Systems Agency wants some really smart folks to help it, the Central Command, the State Department and the Agency for International Development to build an information communications technology infrastructure for Afghanistan.

The work will be performed for the Task Force for Business and Stability Operations, which works out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and DISA says it wants senior-level expertise to jump start a commercial communications industry in Afghanistan.

This includes a mess of policy and governance stuff as well as a regulatory framework that undoubtedly will require inflicting the Afghan government with reams of Power Point slides.

The United States has operated in Afghanistan for nine years and based on a FedBizOpps notice last week, at least one part of the Army plans for another five years.

The Rock Island Contracting Center of the Army Contracting Command said it plans to issue next week a request for proposals for Army mail services. The contract will have one base year and five option years, which shows at least one part of the Army has long-range plans in Afghanistan.

I don't know if the folks who deliver mail for the Army have any special insight into top-level strategic thinking or are just good planners. But the notice sure does confirm that careful reading of FedBizOpps is a good way to discern long-range plans at a very low level -- i.e. pretty good open source intelligence.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the bad guys in Afghanistan and Iraq have cleverly figured out how to use a $29.95 software package called SkyGrabber to intercept video feeds from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

The SkyGrabber software was developed by a Russian company to pirate commercial satellite TV and Internet feeds, and the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan has evidently figured out how to use it to tap into UAV air-to-ground links.

The Journal story catapulted SkyGrabber into the fifth most popular search term on Google for most of today, and as a result the SkyGrabber Web site was unreachable due to overwhelming traffic.

But if you want to learn more about SkyGrabber, Philip Coyle III, senior advisor at the Center for Defense Information, told me he had found this nifty YouTube video that provides a basic tutorial on how to install the software.

Softpedia provides some excellent screen shots from the SkyGrabber software package, including this one, which shows a toggle into the C-band frequency, which is used by Predator UAVs for an air to ground downlink.

Be warned: Bad actors already have capitalized on the interest in SkyGrabber to distribute malware. I went to one site and immediately encountered one of those phony "Your computer is infected with a virus" messages and quickly backed out. Softpedia, a reliable site, is a safer place to download the software.

Gen. James Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, told a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday that he strongly disagreed with a U.S. Central Command directive that the infrastructure in Afghanistan needs beefing up before more troops can be sent there.

The Marines plan to deploy 7,000 troops to Afghanistan over the next few months, and Conway said the Marines can do so without extra infrastructure.

Expeditionary warfare is the Marines stock in trade, he said, and the Corps can carry out its mission with purely organic assets.

These assets -- along with the ability to do more with less that I know all too well -- will require the Marines to live and operate on what "everyone else considers moonscape," Conway said.

I start many work days by trolling through upcoming procurements and contract awards on FedBizOpps.gov, a task somewhat akin to looking for needles in a haystack.

Today I found some real interesting needles: Two contract awards for combat radios the Army decided to run through the General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Service. These are the kinds of awards I might have scrolled by because as they looked rather hum-drum.

But since I once carried a radio on my back in the Marine Corps, I decided to dig a little deeper, not to mention the fact that I was also spurred by curiosity about why GSA would post contract awards without any value. I discovered these contracts were far from hum-drum when it came to the bucks involved.

GSA awarded to Harris Corp. a sole-source contract for 1,962 of its AN/PRC-150 HF/VHF radios used by ground troops for a total value of $146.6 million. It also awarded Boeing a $40 million sole-source contract for 5,201 Combat Survivor Evader Locator radios used by downed pilots to call for help.

There are two wars going on, and I don't begrudge the Army buying the radios it needs, but why such an opaque approach to the expenditure of real money in an era of transparency?

The answer, I have a hunch, is to hide these procurements from Congress. As I reported in October, Congress slashed the service's budget for tactical radios because the Army "has been unable to put a disciplined acquisition process in place to procure the needed equipment in a manner that avoids waste, fosters true competition, [and] moves the Army away from reliance on legacy radio systems."

During the Big One -- that would be World War II -- my father, like many soldiers, communicated from the Pacific with my mother by V-Mail (Victory Mail). It was advanced technology for the time and was developed to reduce the mail sent to forward locations.

My father would write a letter on a special V-Mail form, take it to his unit post office where it was microfilmed. About 150,000 microfilmed letters fit into one mail sack, according to the all-knowing Wiki folks. When the sack reached the states, the microfilmed letters were enlarged, printed and sent on their way.

The Army has updated this approach with HooahMail to speed the delivery of mail to soldiers in Afghanistan. It went into operation on Tuesday. Friends or family of troops in Afghanistan can log on the site, type in a soldier's address, type in a message, attach a digital photo if they want to and then press send.

The letter is routed via the Internet to one of 10 locations in Afghanistan where special equipment will automatically print, fold, address, stuff the message into an envelope and then seal it. The envelopes are then placed into the regular intra-theater mail delivery system.

Bill Hilsher, Army postal program manager, said HooahMail cuts down delivery of mail to troops in Afghanistan from 14 days to next-day or even same day delivery.

What's next? Spam, which my father wouldn't touch after the Big One, that tastes good?