As the U.S. tries to hand over responsibility for the Afghan war to the new Afghan military it’s built, some very old weapons systems are poised to become crucial: the mortar and the howitzer.
The plan for 2013 is for the 66,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to draw down to an as-yet-undecided size at an as-yet-undecided pace. Those that remain will take a back seat to Afghans by the spring, as the Afghans plan and execute their own operations, a subtle shift from the “partnered” patrols the U.S. emphasized in 2012. Only the Afghans don’t yet have some of the crucial equipment, particularly fighter aircraft and attack helicopters, to help units that come under fire.
With the Afghans’ relative absence of close air support, “what we must do, then, is bring the surface fire capability to fruition, and that’s the indirect fire, observed indirect fire,” Army Lt. Gen. James L. Terry, the day-to-day commander of the war, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday. Chief among them: the D-30 howitzer, a Russian-built 12 mm gun, and 60 mm mortars.
“So now instead of calling back up into the air, they have those organic capabilities inside those formations,” Terry said.
Pentagon officials cautioned that that doesn’t mean the U.S. air war is going to come to an end in 2013. But it’s on a downward trajectory. According to U.S. Air Force statistics, in 2012, U.S. warplanes fired their weapons 4,095 times, the lowest level recorded since 2009′s pre-surge 4,165 weapons releases. Close air support sorties in total were down to 28,471 last year — higher than in 2009, but still lower than their 2010 and 2011 levels.
But the whole idea is to shift the burden of the war onto the nascent Afghan forces. And with Afghan air power running behind Afghan ground forces, protecting Afghan forces under attack is going to be largely a ground responsibility. Terry praised “Afghan solutions” like the rise of a “mobile strike force, an armored wheeled-based platform” that seven Afghan battalions will use. As of now, it’s unarmed, so its purpose is to help Afghan troops survive an attack rather than repel one, but “potentially we’ll look at if we need to put a gun system on one of those platforms.”
Less clear is what the smaller complement of U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2013 will do in their forthcoming “security force assistance” formations, of which there will be over 400. Their mission will be to train, advise and assist the Afghans as the Afghan troops plan and execute their own fights. But Terry signaled that U.S. forces won’t just be sitting on their bases and advising headquarters staffs.
“This is not simply about doing less,” Terry said, but rather about giving the “right resources” to the Afghans, at the battalion-level and above, so they can hold territory from insurgents.
“Those [U.S.] organizations are not purely headquarters focused, but they are focused, then, on increasing the capability with the Afghans. It doesn’t mean they won’t be going out on patrol with them, either,” Terry said, adding that “some of this training will obviously have to be done in contact” with insurgents — especially providing some of the “enabling capabilities,” like the air support that only the U.S. can provide for now.
Until the Afghans build up their own air force and air-attack specialties, Afghanistan’s soldiers are about to launch a lot more artillery strikes.
Coming This Year to Afghanistan: Way More Artillery Strikes
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Coming This Year to Afghanistan: Way More Artillery Strikes
