Dyncorp bean counters getting jittery at business opportunity...
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Leaving Vietnam vs AFG
- Thread starter jmcquate
- Start date
Yeah, the US CTR stuff is an exception such as the DoS Phrogs. But my point remains for the hardware that was owned by AFG.
The MRAP most definitely did exist before 2000, just not by that name. What we think of MRAPs actually finds its roots in the Rhodesian War, where government forces had to contend with mines and IED's planted on the roads by the anti-government forces. The Rhodesian military created several crude but effective vehicles to counter that tactic. Both the anti-government tactics and the vehicles used to counter them migrated to Namibia and Angola where South Africa and its allies were fighting against the Angolan government, allied with the Cubans, and the rebels it backed in Namibia. South Africa, with a much more formidable industrial base than Rhodesia, then started creating and fielding what we now know as MRAP's.
Several of the vehicles that we used as MRAP's were in fact variants of latter generation South African-designed armored vehicles.
Military history, good for more than just the occasional quiz contest questions.
I had forgotten that the initial MRAPs were from South Africa.
And in the same era, roadside bombs figured heavily in the Angolan war of independence from Portugal (the war goes by a few names). Interesting fact, for a time the Portuguese military effort there included something like only seven helicopters (compare that with how many helicopters we used in the Vietnam War!). Their counterinsurgency campaign was very measured and patient, not an overwhelming approach nor a logistically "industrial" approach, and it ended mainly because of domestic politics. The rest is in books...
We bought a lot of RG-31s, from South Africa in the early to mid 2000s, to use in Iraq while we were still spooling up our own homegrown MRAP designs and at the same time fumbling around with "up armored" Humvees.
The MRAP that you see in a lot of those Afghanistan pictures and in old Iraq pics is kind of an International Harvester dump truck chassis with a really thick metal box on top. It can carry a squad and then some, but it's pretty also bulky for a lot of roads in both theaters, from tight spaces in the city (the antennas would sometimes snag the low-hanging rat's nests of overhead electrical wires in urban Iraq) or narrow goat paths in rough terrain.
The RG-31 is a very good vehicle but make no mistake, its roots go back to the Apartheid era.
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A very similar story in Rhodesia, where the small but well-trained military and police forces backed by an equally well-trained but very small aerial force fought and a lot more often than not defeated tens of thousands of anti-government forces for well over a decade. A Marine's war college paper I read called it possibly the 'best counter-insurgency force of the 20th Century' and he may not be far off the mark. In the end though it was again politics that decided the outcome of the conflict as it did in Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan.
As has been mentioned by others I seriously doubt the Taliban will be able to maintain the aircraft and much of the rest of the more complex equipment they captured in any sort of useful capacity. The Afghan military prior to their fall had trouble themselves keeping their equipment running without significant external assistance both in men and material.
Iran had a significant industrial base, an educated populace along with significant resources to buy equipment to keep their American equipment maintained in a somewhat useful fashion. The Taliban have hardly any of that. Previously they could keep only a handful, as in a literal handful, of aircraft from the previous Soviet-backed regime in working order and I doubt their technical expertise has expanded since then.
A serious question, how useful would Bagram have been when Afghanistan collapsed? It is roughly 50km by air and 60-70 km by road to Kabul. I presume it would have been much more difficult for vast majority of the evacuees to get to Bagram than Kabul International, with many likely having to be transported by air from Kabul to Bagram. It would have made more sense to me to leave a more sizable contingent at HKIA if that was possible, in the event that everything went to shit like it did.
It seems to be a more realistic option but I've also never been there so don't have first-hand knowledge of how difficult or realistic either of those options were.
All true, but it is still possible they can get foreign help maintaining more complex equipment. Russian, Turk, Chinese, Qatari, etc. All of the aforementioned would be happy to look the other way if said equipment was used for purposes the US and West found objectionable.
I haven’t been to either place either. I mentioned it because apparently that was what advocated and overruled by the administration. Using a more remote base would have reduced the reliance on the Taliban for security as well. From that standpoint things could have gone much, much worse.
When I was at Bagram in 2008 there were regular efforts to penetrate the wire. I don’t know what was around it, being a heads-down fobbit, but it seemed to be in Indian country, so to speak.
You are being pedantic. Clearly I meant the US DoD model MRAP of which the entire acquisition cycle began years after 9/11. Did we roll into Iraq in 2003 with MRAPs? No, of course not, bc they weren’t in the US inventory yet.
Bastion is the only place in Afg I’ve been other than flying, and was out in the desert and as a result apparently got a lot less IDF than Kandahar. It’s a good thing the Taliban mostly stuck with the plan because the airlift wouldn’t have worked under fire.
As others have mentioned there's really a family of MRAP vehicles since numerous different designs were produced to meet the need. I don't know if they ever settled on a common design.
But the point they're making is that it's not a super high tech grab by the Taliban because its highly proliferated and based on a decades old design.