A Brand-New U.S. Military Headquarters in Afghanistan. And Nobody to Use It.
A Brand-New U.S. Military Headquarters in Afghanistan. And Nobody to Use It. By Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Washington Post.
The U.S. military has erected a 64,000-square-foot headquarters building on the dusty moonscape of southwestern Afghanistan that comes with all the tools to wage a modern war. A vast operations center with tiered seating. A briefing theater. Spacious offices. Fancy chairs. Powerful air conditioning.
Everything, that is, except troops.
The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it. Commanders in the area, who insisted three years ago that they did not need the building, now are in the process of withdrawing forces and see no reason to move into the new facility…
I originally had a comment about the wealthiest counties in DC but I edited it. You can figure out the gist of it.
PS: Maybe it’s good that I did since the contract went to a British company from the article?
Can we have an honest talk about coalition warfare (no, this is not an anti-British rant, believe you me I am sympathetic to British unhappiness with following-the-Americans around) and what it means to build alliances for something like a nation building project? Or even an “anti-terrorist” coalition effort?
If working with partners is going to be the “thing” in the future, then it won’t just be the DOD, it will be every nation’s bureaucracy that is being managed, the whole global contracting business running its numbers.
So, we have to do it. I get it. How to balance effectiveness of outcome with consensus management?
PPS: “His assessment went unheeded.” From the article. This is the real heart of the article, I suppose, and I went off on one of my tangents instead….
Classic. A similar thing happened when we built a base for Afghan forces in the south. The Afghan base was actually constructed to be better than OUR base. All the buildings and walls were made from reinforced concrete – all we had were plywood and HESCOs. The commander refused to move in unless we installed air conditioning in each of the buildings (with generators regularly topped off by gas bought by the Army, of course). He got his base and his air conditioning, courtesy of our paycheck deductions. As if that wasn’t enough, the Kandak had free sewage, water, and trash removal. So the Afghan soldiers took their dumps in comfortable hardstand buildings with air conditioning and prompt s*** removal, thanks to our money. It wouldn’t rub me so wrong if their commanders didn’t plot to kill us on a regular basis and work directly with the Taliban whenever it tickled their fancy. Well that, and the fact that we’re leaving in a year and the Afghans will probably run out of resrouces to maintain it in short time. That’s 3 million dollars – wasted, in my humble opinion. And that’s just one example of dozens of bases built by the Army throughout Afghanistan in the last 2-3 years. I believe most will be useless in 2-3 more.