Feral Jundi

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Industry Talk: FBO Solicitations– PSC Services For FOB Howz-e-Madad And FOB Lindsey Deuce, Afghanistan

Filed under: Afghanistan,Industry Talk — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 10:35 PM

     Here are two more to add to the four solicitations posted July 30th. Now I hope that whomever wins these contracts will actually provide a good service and have the decency to treat and pay their contractors right.  Unfortunately, all of this stuff is being contracted under that LPTA crap, and I predict services and pay will be an issue because of this ‘race to the bottom’ that comes with this type of contract mechanism. Just take all the headaches that came from that LPTA child called TWISS in Iraq, and throw them on these FOB’s in Afghanistan.

     I wonder if the contracting officer Maj. James Mote thinks LPTA works?  I am sure this is mandated up at the top through the budget or congress, but still? –Matt

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PRIVATE SECURITY CONTRACTOR (PSC) SERVICES AT FOB HOWZ-E-MADAD, AFGHANISTAN

Solicitation Number: W91B4L-10-T-0080

Agency: Department of the Army

Office: Joint Contracting Command, Iraq/Afghanistan

Location: KANDAHAR RCC

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PRIVATE SECURITY CONTRACTOR (PSC) SERVICES AT FOB LINDSEY DEUCE, AFGHANISTAN

Solicitation Number: W91B4L-10-T-0081

Agency: Department of the Army

Office: Joint Contracting Command, Iraq/Afghanistan

Location: KANDAHAR RCC

 

Media News: The Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan–Saad Mohseni And The Moby Group

Filed under: Afghanistan,Media News — Tags: , , , , , , , — Matt @ 5:30 PM

     Next month, it expects to launch Tolo News, a twenty-four-hour satellite news channel. In 2009, it partnered with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation to create the Farsi1 satellite network, which packages entertainment programs in Dubai and beams them from England into Iran. In fact, Mohseni has been called the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, and though the comparison is extravagant, it gives a sense of his influence and ambition.

*****

     Excellent article about a very important person and their impact on Afghanistan.  Especially on Afghanistan’s future.  Media like Saad’s is an excellent tool for reaching out to the population and telling them how things really are.  They can communicate how ineffective Karzai and his crew is (hence why he does not like Saad) and they can communicate how immoral and murderous the Taliban are(and I am sure the Taliban want to kill him). And what better way to accomplish these important tasks of media and journalism, than to fire up a 24 hour news show.

     Hopefully Murdoch and company will come in and help Saad to create entertainment that the local populations ‘cannot live without’. Stuff that really brings a smile to their face, or educates them.  That is crucial, because if people come to depend upon Saad and his entertainment networks as either a means for information or just to laugh and relieve stress, and the Taliban or Government destroys that, stand by. Guess who will lose popular support?

     I am sure the Taliban would love to destroy this media company while they are still small.  So would a corrupt government. But as it becomes a fixture of society and something people can call their own, doom on those that would destroy it. It is also great that they continue to call upon the constitution of Afghanistan’s free speech laws, and really push the issue if programming or stories are questioned.

    Of course a company like this will not go too far towards entertainment extremes, because they still have to answer to the public.  But as long as they have an audience and high ratings, I say full speed ahead.

    A 24 hour news show can also inform Afghanis about horrible incidents like what happened to these medical workers that were massacred recently. Or they can get the real story out about what happened with DynCorp and the accident. They can communicate edits immediately, and not wait for the next day’s newspaper or show to make that edit. It would make if very hard for misinformation campaigns to be successful, because this station would have a larger audience and were able to communicate to that audience faster and with better delivery.

    What I would really like to see are talk shows on the radio, intermixed with the 24 hour news shows.  In the US these are very successful combinations, and I am sure Saad is up to date on the possibilities. (hell, just copy Rupert Murdoch’s media strategies)

    The other interesting thought about this is that with the race to the middle to gain popular support, media centers like this one will be important to each side’s political strategy.  The Taliban would have to weigh in on the benefits of either destroying it, or working with it to gain population support.  The government will have to do the same.

     So with that said, one little thing we can do to help Afghanistan, is to insure that this media center is well protected and truly entertains and informs the people. And if Ted Turner wants to come in and help out another media group, so be it.  The more the merrier, because competition will fire up innovation and quality entertainment. –Matt

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The Networker

Afghanistan’s first media mogul.

by Ken Auletta

July 5, 2010

Every day in Kabul, politicians and journalists in search of information come to a barricaded dead-end street in the Wazir Akbar Khan district to see Saad Mohseni, the chairman of Moby Group, Afghanistan’s preëminent media company. At the last house on the right, burly men carrying AK-47s lead them up creaky stairs to a small second-floor office. Mohseni, a gregarious man with a politician’s habits, often stands up to greet visitors with a hug, then returns to his desk, where a BlackBerry, two cell phones, and a MacBook Air laptop are constantly lit up; fifteen small flat-screen TVs, set to mute, are mounted on the office walls.

Mohseni speaks so rapidly that the words sometimes run together, and he periodically interrupts himself to call out to his assistant—“Sekander!”—to make a phone call or produce a piece of paper. But he listens as intently as a psychiatrist, gathering information from an intricate network of sources: government and anti-government Afghans, American officials, foreign correspondents, diplomats, intelligence operatives, reporters, business and tribal and even Taliban leaders.

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Afghanistan: Karzai Calls For Ban On Foreign PSC’s To Get Back At U.S. Over Anticorruption Efforts

Filed under: Afghanistan,Industry Talk — Tags: , , , , — Matt @ 12:12 PM

   Karzai just kills me sometimes.  It was guys from DynCorp and other companies over the years that saved his life with professional PSD teams, over and over again.  But hey, if these anticorruption units are tearing apart Crazy Karzai’s little mafia, then that is great and he can cry all he wants. Maybe he will get the point that there are a lot of people fighting and dying for the sake of his government, and the least he could do is square away his house.  And if he can’t do it, then by god, we will pull him along kicking and screaming. Call it tough love. lol

   As for him actually banning companies?  Good luck there.  It is the foreign companies that are actually delivering a better service than these local afghani companies, just because these ‘foreign PSC’s’ have folks who are trained and have discipline.  They also operate with more scrutiny than any of the local companies.

   I think what might really be happening is that maybe these foreign companies are being tasked to watch over, or even take over some of these local national contracts that have been so screwed up.  If that is the case, then of course Crazy Karzai and his insane clown posse would be pissed, because that would cut into his crew’s profit margin. This is just another opportunity for him to try and further consolidate the market under his family’s control.  Just some thoughts on the matter, and it sounds like politics and business as usual.-Matt

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Karzai Calls for Ban on Private Security Companies

Afghan President’s Remarks Add to Strains With U.S. Over Anticorruption Efforts

AUGUST 8, 2010

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV And MARIA ABI-HABIB

KABUL—Afghan President Hamid Karzai lashed out against foreign interference and called for a ban on the private security companies that protect many Western installations here, in a speech that ratchets up recent tensions with the U.S. over two American-backed anticorruption agencies.

“We have the ability to rule and govern our country and we have our sovereignty. We hope that NATO countries and the U.S. pay attention,” Mr. Karzai told a gathering of Afghan public servants in a speech on Saturday. “No Afghan administration will be successful unless it lays off its foreign advisers and replaces them with Afghans.”

The call to ban private security companies came a week after a convoy of DynCorp International, which provides security in Afghanistan under a U.S. State Department contract, was involved in a car accident that killed an Afghan civilian in Kabul. The accident sparked rioting and anti-American protests.

The 10 aid workers killed last week as they returned to Kabul from a remote part of the country didn’t have a security detail.

The Afghan leader’s defiant weekend speech came days after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton phoned Mr. Karzai to press him to live up to his anticorruption commitments, according to U.S. officials, warning that his recent attempt to weaken two U.S.-mentored antigraft agencies could endanger the chances of congressional approval for billions of dollars in aid to Afghanistan.

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Friday, August 6, 2010

Building Snowmobiles: Using Economic Theory To Predict Enemy Strategy?

Filed under: Afghanistan,Building Snowmobiles,Strategy — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Matt @ 1:38 AM

“It is clear that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political activity by other means.” Karl Von Clauswitz

“What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy.” – Sun Tzu

     First off, I want to mention that this post is the product of one of my reader’s ‘a ha’ moments.  What really makes this cool is that this reader is a fan of the ‘building snowmobiles’ posts on FJ and this was him putting together these random pieces and creating something out of all of it.  He had attended a college course years back that covered economic theory, he is well read on the war and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, he had read Feral Jundi and knew how fun analysis and synthesis can be, and then finally stumbled on some recent news about the war and Taliban strategy, and put it all together. And this is me trying to assemble the thing based on his instructions, and I am thoroughly enjoying myself.

     Simply put, this is about using economic theory as a potential tool to predict enemy strategies, so you can defeat those strategies.  Because like Sun Tzu says, it ‘is of supreme importance to attack the enemy’s strategy’. Of course I am not going to go all out and say you can predict with 100 percent certainty what your enemy will do. Still, the closer you can get the better, and these are potential tools you can use for predictive analysis.

    In this exercise, we will use Afghanistan and the current war against the Taliban there. At this time, we are also using a counter-insurgency strategy.  The Taliban are considered the insurgents in this case, and they too are using a insurgency type strategy.  Both strategies are heavily influenced by gaining the support of the population. Famous counter-insurgent David Galula had this to say about counterinsurgency:

The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population Galula proposes four “laws” for counterinsurgency:

1.The aim of the war is to gain the support of the population rather than control of territory.

2.Most of the population will be neutral in the conflict; support of the masses can be obtained with the help of an active friendly minority.

3.Support of the population may be lost. The population must be efficiently protected to allow it to cooperate without fear of retribution by the opposite party.

4.Order enforcement should be done progressively by removing or driving away armed opponents, then gaining support of the population, and eventually strengthening positions by building infrastructure and setting long-term relationships with the population. This must be done area by area, using a pacified territory as a basis of operation to conquer a neighbouring area.

Galula contends that:

A victory [in a counterinsurgency] is not the destruction in a given area of the insurgent’s forces and his political organization. … A victory is that plus the permanent isolation of the insurgent from the population, isolation not enforced upon the population, but maintained by and with the population. … In conventional warfare, strength is assessed according to military or other tangible criteria, such as the number of divisions, the position they hold, the industrial resources, etc. In revolutionary warfare, strength must be assessed by the extent of support from the population as measured in terms of political organization at the grass roots. The counterinsurgent reaches a position of strength when his power is embedded in a political organization issuing from, and firmly supported by, the population. 

   I wanted to put this out there first as one of the main definitions of COIN, so we have somewhere to start.(most strategies are population-centric)  In this war, we are basically fighting for the support of the people, and you could easily say that this is politics with guns.  You could also say that both sides of this conflict are selling to the population that they are a better idea and friend than the other guy.  The Taliban use their methods to achieve population support, and we use ours. In other words, we are in the business of politics in this war. We are trying to win votes or popularity, and like politicians, we are finding all and any way to win as many votes as possible.

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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Logistics: DoD Continues Undeclared War Against Private Sector Sustainment, By Daniel Goure, Ph.D.

Filed under: Afghanistan,Industry Talk,Iraq,Logistics — Tags: , , , , , , — Matt @ 1:36 AM

     This was a quick blog post by the author, but definitely interesting. I was really curious about this concept called a ‘whispering campaign’? Check it out. –Matt

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DoD Continues Undeclared War Against Private Sector Sustainment

Daniel Goure, Ph.D.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Even as Secretary Gates and Under Secretary Carter conduct civilized exchanges with leaders of defense industry, the undeclared war by the Department of Defense (DoD) on the private sector continues. This war has focused particularly on the role of private companies in providing logistics and sustainment for U.S. forces. It has not only been overt with contracts being cancelled and work once done by private contractors dragged back into the government depot system, but it also includes a “whispering campaign” in which the cost effectiveness of private contractor logistics providers is questioned. Senior DoD logistics and sustainment officials routinely make comments in public meetings or to media outlets critical of the private sector and its need for profits. DoD executives have repeatedly asserted that contractor logistics support (CLS) and performance-based logistics (PBL) contracts are too expensive and that the government could do the same work for less.

These kinds of assertions fly in the face of available evidence. Data available to DoD officials clearly demonstrates that private sector support is generally less costly than the same work done by the organic or government sustainment system. The Air Force’s own data shows that the average annual cost growth for aircraft programs supported solely from the organic industrial base was greater than that for aircraft programs under either PBL or CLS arrangements. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics has identified a set of PBL contracts which collectively have saved the government more than $1.5 billion.

PBLs have a proven record of providing high availability rates as well as delivering year over year cost savings greater than the 2-3 percent productivity goals of the OSD efficiency initiative. This is supported by the OSD Product Support Assessment Team’s report on PBLs. For example, Boeing’s C-17 Global Support Program provides for one of the lowest DPFH (dollars per flight hour) platforms in the USAF inventory. Comparing FY04 costs to FY09 costs, U.S. Air Force data shows the GSP program has reduced C-17 DPFH by 28 percent over that period. The C-17 GSP 28 percent reduction was achieved while maintaining the best mission capable rates in airlift (84-85 percent).

It should be noted also that DoD is almost totally dependent on private contractors for its logistics and sustainment. For example, a recent article in Government Executive recounted the extraordinary efforts of “defense logisticians” in maintaining the flow of weapons, fuel and supplies to our forces in Afghanistan. According to a senior DoD official quoted in the article, “We are meeting a 1.1 million gallons a day demand for fuel for the U.S. and coalition forces while feeding 435,000 meals a day to U.S. service personnel and civilians on the ground.” Except for a brief reference to the use of commercial routes to get supplies into Afghanistan from the north, the article fails to note that all the supply routes, from the south and north, are run by private companies such as Maersk Line Limited and APL. Defense logisticians know this and respect the work of private logistics providers. Unfortunately, this article helps to perpetuate the myth that the government is providing the logistics for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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