Afghanistan gouge

Four milbloggers with experience in Afghanistan have teamed up to launch Afghan Lessons Learned for Soldiers.  Vampire 06 sums up the purpose: "We want to make this a one stop shop for open source info on culture, equipment, COIN, FOB reviews and anything else we can think of or you might think you may need."  The title of the blog makes clear that the intended audience is the real army, but if the first few posts are any indication of where they are going, it looks to be great pre-deployment information on Afghanistan that Navy IAs would find useful as well.

And if you don't already read them: Bouhammer, War On Terror News, Bill And Bob's Excellent Afghan Adventure, and Afghanistan Shrugged.

What's in a name?

What's in a name?  That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet;

What do you get when you promise to flood Afghanistan with Americans, but don't have the bodies to follow through on your promise?

Military reservists may be asked to volunteer to fill many of the hundreds of additional U.S. civilian positions in Afghanistan called for in the Obama administration's strategy for that nation and neighboring Pakistan, officials said yesterday.

So the President wants "several hundred" civilian bodies to beef up our presence in Afghanistan by the end of the fiscal year.  That's in about five months.  Having been on the receiving end of the federal hiring process before (and about to jump back into that pool again) let me summarize my opinion: good luck with that.

So...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton this week discussed the possibility of identifying reservists in civilian fields and inviting them to volunteer for the jobs provided certain conditions could be met.

The State Department, officials said, wants the reservists to dress in civilian clothes and to report up a civilian chain of command reaching to an overall civilian coordinator who would supervise all nonmilitary U.S. programs in Afghanistan.

An IA without the Army lifestyle?  Let me be the first to say "where do I sign up?"  Here's the upside: the radical idea here is to take reservists whose civilian skills would be useful and actually let them use their skills.  So an agronomist would actually work on agronomist stuff.  Combine this with a relatively crummy job outlook back in the states, and reports that there are more officers asking to go IA right now than there are billets to fill, and it looks like a win-win to me.  Here's the downside: I'm going to assume that dressing in civilian clothes means no body armor and no weapon.  Not sure I like that part of the deal.

Still, I wonder if Madame Secretary has any use for a lawyer with a degree in diplomacy?

h/t Gen X in Iraq