Soldier / Geek: An Army Science Advisor's Journal of the War in Afghanistan

By Glenn Dean

In 2009, an Army Major deployed a small team of specialists to Afghanistan to identify new technologies needed to fight the war. Traveling from Forward Operating Bases to Combat Outposts, braving rockets and IEDs, fighting the Army bureaucracy more than the enemy, this small team worked to improve everything from robots to mine-resistant trucks, boots, and parachutes. This journal of the team's deployment provides an insider's view into the lives of deployed soldiers and the complex process that delivers new equipment and weapons to the combat zone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glenn Dean
• Release date: Feb 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781465851680

Glenn Dean

Glenn Dean was commissioned as an Armor officer through the Army ROTC program at the Florida Institute of Technology with a degree in Aerospace Engineering. He was subsequently assigned to operational Armor and Cavalry assignments in the 24th Infantry Division, 3rd Infantry Division, and the 1st Cavalry Division, as well as a tour in Recruiting Command. After completing graduate work in Industrial & Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he transitioned to the Army Acquisition career field. He currently works in weapons systems development and has worked in combat development, program management, and technology development in the fields of small arms, medium caliber cannons, ammunition, and combat vehicles.

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Soldier / Geek

An Army Science Advisor’s Journal of the War in Afghanistan

By Glenn Dean

Copyright © 2009, 2011, 2012 by Glenn Dean. All Rights Reserved.

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All photos are the work of the author.

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a personal memoir, and represents the view of one soldier serving in Operation Enduring Freedom during one phase of the conflict in Afghanistan. The views presented here do not represent official policies or positions of US Forces Afghanistan, the United States Army, or the Department of Defense. Though the journal entries recounted here are accurate as of their original writing in 2009, the names of participants have been obscured to protect those still serving.

Cover Photo: RG31 MRAP from a Route Clearance Patrol.

Contents

Introduction

Prologue

CRC

Deploying

March 2009

April 2009

May 2009

June 2009

July 2009

August 2009

September 2009

Redeploying

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Acronym List

About the Author

Introduction

In March of 2009 I deployed to Afghanistan, where as an Army Major I served as the Science & Technology Advisor to the staffs of Combined/Joint Task Force-101 and Combined/Joint Task Force-82. Based out of Bagram Air Base some 50 kilometers north of the Afghan capital of Kabul, my team’s mission was to provide science and technology support to the Task Force, helping to identify critical capability gaps where the application of new technology might provide an advantage to our forces, or exploit some weakness of our enemy. During our tour of duty I was able to travel through much of our sector in eastern Afghanistan, known as Regional Command-East, meeting with soldiers and their commanders to find out what their challenges and needs were, then communicating with the thousands of Army and other service scientists and engineers back in the US to see what kind of solutions they could provide, and ultimately try to get that new technology accelerated into the combat zone.

What follows is the journal that I kept to document my experiences, both those personal experiences as a deployed soldier in a combat zone, and those that were specific to my particular posting. My experience is not unique – there are other uniformed science advisors serving in Afghanistan and elsewhere today – but it is different from many other wartime memoirs. This is not a story of combat, per se, but rather one of supporting and enabling combat. Few soldiers ever really understand how their equipment is identified, developed, and delivered to them. Though the press prints reams of words on various Department of Defense modernization initiatives and military programs, few outside of the DOD understand how that process works in the combat theater.

I have two purposes in sharing my team’s experiences. First, I’d like to share the experiences of deployed soldiers to help those who haven’t served better understand those of us who volunteer our service, hopefully providing a more personal connection to the military and the war in Afghanistan than watching the evening news. Second, through my own story I’d like to help document some of the history of the Army’s Science & Technology Advisory Teams, and give soldiers and civilians alike a better idea of some of the ways we go about getting technology in the hands of soldiers. In doing so, I hope to be able to provide a different perspective on the uniquely materiel-driven machine that is the American way of war.

As a personal journal, my notes are a frank recording of what occurred on a daily or weekly basis during my deployment. I have added commentary (in italic text) on the individual journal entries to help fill in some of the gaps, and where possible better translate my experiences to a broader audience. Enough time has passed that the information here should be neither current nor exploitable, though I have chosen to remain vague in some areas to ensure that that remains the case. Many of my observations were shared with my family as emails home at the time, and I was careful not to put too much detail into my letters so that I would not reveal anything potentially compromising that might put me and my fellow soldiers at risk. This work contains no classified information; I have also disguised the names of most of those soldiers referenced in my journal, to protect their privacy. Otherwise, the words and emotions recorded in the journal entries remain unchanged from when I originally wrote them in theater.

The views and opinions expressed are entirely my own, of course, and do not reflect the official views of the military organizations concerned, the Army, or the Department of Defense.

Prologue: Volunteer

October 2008 – March 2009

Permission.

As the garage door rolled closed behind me, shutting me off from a crisp New Jersey autumn afternoon, I took a deep breath and steadied myself. I was about to embark on what was probably the single toughest encounter of my entire military career. I shut the car off and sat for a moment, considering, then accepted the inevitable and got out of the car. I steeled myself and stepped through the door into the kitchen of our home.

My wife, Kei, was elbow-deep in raw meat preparing several weeks’ worth of rations for our three show dogs, all of whom came bounding over to welcome me home. I gave the dogs a pat on the head, set down my black beret and stepped forward.

Hey, she waved, Give me a hand here. She turned to putting lids on the containers of food she had just filled with raw meat.

Sure, I said, But first, I have something to tell you.

It must have been my tone, because she froze, eyes going flat, staring out at me from under her mop of dark hair. It was THE LOOK, the one every soldier knows, the one he or she gets when informing the family of the next soon-to-be life changing event. I’d gotten this one before, the last time a little over two years prior when I announced that we were being reassigned from warm Fort Benning, Georgia to a little-known place in northern New Jersey called Picatinny Arsenal. That was a picnic compared to what was coming next.

What? she asked quickly, We’re not moving again, are we? You just changed jobs!

I had, in fact, just changed jobs and organizations. I had spent the previous two years as an Assistant Product Manager working in medium caliber ammunition, involved in managing, designing, and manufacturing ammunition for Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Apache helicopters, A-10 and F-18 fighter jets, and the Army’s soldier-carried M203 grenade launcher. I had moved in September from the program office to the armaments lab – officially, the Armaments Research, Development, and Engineering Center, or ARDEC – where I was the lead for the lab’s Quick Reaction Task Force. On paper, I headed up any efforts to rapidly develop new armament solutions in response to special requests from units deployed overseas. In practice, I mostly herded cats, trying to get requirements cleared up and some resources in place so that all of the myriad organizations involved in developing and fielding new weapons systems could be satisfied while keeping them out of the way of the engineers who were trying to rapidly design, test, and deploy a new piece of equipment. We were involved with a flare gun project for a unit in Iraq at the time, but for the most part things had been relatively quiet in the month since I had joined the team.

No, we’re not moving, I said, but an opportunity has come up that I need to talk to you about.

She relaxed, but only just. You’re deploying, aren’t you. It was a statement, not a question. Call it Army spouse’s intuition, or sixteen years of marriage, or maybe it was the look on my face, but Kei had gotten there ahead of me.

I have an opportunity to volunteer for an assignment in Afghanistan, I said, finally getting the lead weight off of my chest. It’s not final yet – I wanted to talk to you about it first. But I did tell my boss about it, and the opportunity is mine if I want it. You know …

Yes, she cut me off, I know how you feel that you’re not doing your part, and that you feel it’s your duty. And I know you feel you have to. How long will you be gone?

Not long – four to six months. We’d had this discussion a couple of times over the years since 9/11. Despite assignments that supported the war effort, the War on Terror had mostly passed us by. I had been in command of a company in an armored unit at Fort Hood, Texas, when the World Trade Center was attacked. There was little call for mechanized units during the invasion of Afghanistan that followed, so we continued to train and beef up the security at our post. Our brigade had subsequently deployed to Kuwait, to build the bases from which the eventual invasion of Iraq was launched, but our battalion was left back in favor of taking a battalion from another brigade that had just returned from Kuwait.

I gave up command in 2002 to transition in to the Acquisition specialty for which I’d volunteered in 1999. I was attending graduate school at Georgia Tech when the invasion of Iraq began. When I subsequently finished school and moved to my next duty position, I had expected orders overseas, but was told, strangely, that Training and Doctrine Command has priority on assignments and went off to the Infantry School to develop requirements for small arms and ammunition. I’d looked into overseas postings a few times since, but aside from a brief trip to Kuwait in 2007 had generally been told that the duties I was performing were more important. I was picking up a lot of battle stars on my CNN combat ribbon, but was rapidly beginning to feel that my lack of relevant theater experience – I’d last deployed as a lieutenant more than ten years prior – was going to leave me out of touch with the rest of the Army. Most of the active duty combat arms formations, to which I’d once belonged as an Armor officer, had deployed. Heck, there were reservists who had multiple tours. I was happy enough not to be living someplace uncomfortable where people wanted to kill me, but not at the expense of someone else who had to do it twice. It hardly seemed fair that they had had to suffer multiple family separations while I’d had it fairly easy.

So we had discussed before that eventually my time was going to come, whether we wanted it or not, and I’d deploy. It is part of the job, and the inevitability of it is something one comes to accept.

Better I volunteer now, and have some control over what I’m doing, I continued, than wait and get an assignment I don’t have some say in.

Kei nodded. What will you be doing?

I’ll be taking the first Science & Technology Assistance Team into Afghanistan, I continued, spending some time explaining what that meant.

As part of the ARDEC, I was a member of the Research, Development, and Engineering Command (RDECOM), itself a part of the Army Materiel Command (AMC). RDECOM contained the eight Army labs and engineering organizations that developed the Army’s technology and weaponry, in conjunction with the program managers of the various Program Executive Offices (PEOs) and the logisticians of AMC.

Several years before, to keep itself current on what was going on in the war on terror and find ways to speed up technology going to the field, RDECOM’s Field Assistance in Science & Technology (FAST) organization had deployed the first Science & Technology Assistance Team (STAT) to Iraq. The team was basically a technology scouting team that consisted of an Army officer-in-charge (OIC), a medical officer (MEDO), a non-commissioned officer-in-charge (NCOIC), and a pair of civilian engineers. Their job was to link up with units in the field, find out what problems the units were having that could be solved by new technology, and relay that back to RDECOM. If a solution could be found, the STAT team would work to bring in a prototype, confirm that it worked, and then work the various channels of Army bureaucracy to help the unit get more of the equipment. A lot of big time, big-dollar organizations were doing this same type of thing in specific areas – the Joint Improvised Explosive Device (IED) Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, being the best known. JIEDDO worked on counter-IED solutions while the RDECOM STAT worked on all other kinds of soldier equipment, from small to large. One of the big STAT successes, which happened to involve my own organization in ARDEC, had been improvements to the gun turrets and armor on our trucks – the Objective Gunner Protection Kit (OGPK). While the STAT team hadn’t designed the original OGPK, it had helped to introduce several important refinements, including improved top armor, which had been picked up by the formal Army truck programs.

RDECOM had had a single officer in Afghanistan supporting JIEDDO efforts in Joint Task Force (JTF) Paladin, the theater counter-IED organization, but since Iraq had been the main theater of focus RDECOM had not deployed a STAT team to Afghanistan. The tide of events in Iraq was now clearly shifting in our favor, and the nation was pushing more support to Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF). The Bush Administration, even with elections just a month away, had announced a new surge of around 30,000 troops for the next year, to include additional combat brigades. The new RDECOM STAT team would be part of that surge.

How safe will you be? Kei asked next.

The hard question. As safe as anyone can expect in a war zone, I’d guess. I said cautiously. I’ll be based at the big airfield at Bagram, which is the biggest base in Afghanistan. That should be pretty safe. I will have to visit units in the field from time to time. But my job will be to take notes and send reports, not go on patrols and engage the enemy. I gave that up when I joined the Army Acquisition Corps.

STAT teams were generally permitted a lot of leeway in their operations. They were intended as general support assets, with the ability to roam around and support any specific unit without being too tied down to any one unit or area. As such, the team leaders had a lot of discretion in what missions they could take on, and the STAT OICs were supposed to manage that risk. We were to be technology scouts, not trigger pullers. Though there was always some element of risk, no STAT team member in Iraq had yet been wounded or killed.

When will you leave? she asked.

Next February or March, I said. They will want us there before the spring thaw, when operations pick up again. Plus they need some time to figure out our living space. I’ll have to do some training first, too, before deploying.

In fact, the decision had not yet been finalized, and the deployment timeline wasn’t set. I’d happened to hear about a staff planning drill to put the first STAT team into Afghanistan, and was leaning forward to get on it, since it hadn’t been announced and they had not yet selected the team. If I moved quickly, I could be involved in and shape the planning for the deployment.

Kei wrapped her arms around me and hugged me, raw meat and all. I don’t want you to go, but I understand why you feel like you have to, she said. If this is something you want to do, I’ll be OK until you get back. Just be sure you get back. Everyone should be as blessed to have as supportive spouse as I have.

The next day I volunteered and was confirmed as the OIC for STAT A-1, Afghanistan.

Preparation.

Nothing moves quickly in a bureaucracy, and that is true even in an Army at war. The preparations for my deployment began in October, and though I eventually deployed the following March they were never really complete.

First, we had to identify team members and set up the individual deployment preparation processes for them. Just getting team members was a challenge in itself. As the OIC, I had volunteered, so that was relatively easy, though the command still needed to line up my replacement so that the follow-on teams could be staffed. That required a decision on tour length. The first STAT teams had been on four-month tours, in part because the deployed members were on what was called Temporary Change of Station, or TCS, orders. TCS means we still belong to our parent organization, which has to deal with having a vacancy while we are deployed. Short tours are easier on the deployed individual and his or her family, and easier on the supporting organization – but much harder on the supported unit in theater, who has to deal with a rapid churn of STAT teams. It is hard to build a long-term supporting relationship when the team members rotate out three time a year, especially when the combat formations were on 12-to-15 month rotations. One year deployments were considered, but would ultimately have been harder to staff, both because it would be harder to get volunteers, and harder for the various RDECOM labs to support (all STATs had been manned by volunteers at that point). As a year rotation would also mean losing touch with what was current back in the labs in the US, RDECOM ultimately settled on a six-month tour, the maximum allowed under TCS orders.

My parent organization, ARDEC, was luckily very supportive of STAT rotations, and had provided several prior OICs and civilian engineers on the Iraq STAT teams. Many of them were still stationed at Picatinny Arsenal, so I had a good chance to pick their brains on how the STAT would best operate once we arrived in theater. As a result of their help, I was able to go in very well prepared for the mission I would perform, already armed with some basic plans and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). My immediate boss, a retired Army Special Forces Colonel, had also previously served as the commander of base operations at Bagram, and was instrumental in giving me an initial orientation to the challenges of operating in Afghanistan.

My NCOIC was identified very quickly, a Sergeant First Class (SFC) out of the Army Research Lab at Adelphi, Maryland. SFC R would serve as my second-in-command, run support operations for the team, conduct soldier interviews, and support evaluations of deployed technology while I focused on planning and leading our operations and the supporting staff work.

We then learned that we would deploy without a MEDO. The Army medical community has its own acquisition and materiel development organization, the Medical Research and Materiel Command (MRMC). As a relatively small organization, they determined that they couldn’t afford to give up an additional MEDO on top of the one currently in Iraq, and since the Afghan mission was still small, RDECOM agreed that MRMC could cover the Afghan medical technology support mission by rotating the Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) MEDO to OEF periodically. (Ultimately, this didn’t work, and MRMC eventually deployed a dedicated MEDO to Afghanistan.)

Civilians were another matter. RDECOM could force military members to deploy if they couldn’t fill the STAT with volunteers, but the civilians had to be volunteers. Despite multiple requests through the command, no civilians would volunteer to deploy to Afghanistan by the time we would deploy. The team would initially go as just a team of two, SFC R and me, instead of the planned five.

That was actually not a huge concern initially due to support problems overseas. At the same time as we were preparing, the 401st Army Field Support Brigade (AFSB), an AMC support organization that was based at Bagram in Afghanistan, would begin preparing living and working space to support the team once we arrived at Bagram. We were but a tiny part of the overall surge – there were several Army brigade elements, consisting of 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers each, including the first Stryker brigade to deploy to Afghanistan, on the troop list for 2009, plus Marine Corps units. The Strykers are a motorized formation using eight-wheeled armored vehicles, and they were scheduled to arrive the following summer.

The infrastructure in Afghanistan, particularly in Kandahar in the south where most of the units were scheduled to go, was extremely limited. Almost the entire inventory of the Army’s rapidly deployable tent cities (systems called Force Provider sets) had to be deployed to Afghanistan in order to provide housing, mess halls, and the rest of the support needed to accommodate units coming in. At the same time, the AFSB was building CHUs (Containerized Housing Units – living quarters built from steel shipping containers) to provide a more enduring set of structures than Force Provider tents. That was challenging, since Afghanistan is the most mined country in the world, and many of the new base locations, and especially Bagram, had to have land de-mined and cleared before base expansion could begin. Emphasis was first on creating space for combat units, then their support units and supporting contractors … STAT teams were pretty low on the priority list.

With the pressure of the expansion, many of the construction projects fell behind schedule, and we soon learned that housing at Bagram was uncertain until at least the April timeframe. So we decided to forgo our civilian engineer team initially, relying on the two military members to get the team established and operational, and hope that by the time some volunteers were identified there would be a place to put them.

With the team settled at two, at least for the time being, we began individual deployment preparation. That consisted of a lengthy round of online classes, medical and dental clearance, and lots of paperwork. That was actually preliminary, since before deploying we would process through the CONUS Replacement Center (CRC) at Fort Benning, Georgia, which was the last stop for so-called Individual Augmentees (IAs) and small units headed overseas. Since the STAT was not an official Army unit, we would be assigned and handled as IAs. The CRC would certify us for deployment, issue equipment, and provide final training before shipping us to Kuwait by way of Afghanistan.

In the meantime, I continued my day job, which involved a twice-weekly secure video teleconference (SVTC) with theater. Those meetings did a lot to get me up to speed on what the specific unit and technology issue were, even though most of the discussion was focused on Iraq, and only a very limited discussion of Afghan requirements occurred. I got to see our JTF Paladin team (now increased to an officer and one NCO) via the VTC, and began communication with them so we would have some initial guides when we arrived at Bagram.

In February, we began three weeks of training orientation I like to call the RDECOM Rodeo. Over the course of three weeks, we visited all (minus one) of the RDECOM lab facilities, in order to get a current update on the various projects they were working on in support of the war. The Rodeo included not only my STAT team, but the next one deploying to Iraq, as well as a number of the Science Advisors for major commands. RDECOM has some overseas International Technology Centers, as well as advisors stationed with the big Joint commands, like Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, performing similar roles as I would do overseas – this was a chance to build our support network as well as orient those advisors to RDECOM capabilities.

The first stop was Fort Belvoir, Virginia, home to the RDECOM FAST office, where we received our initial orientation to FAST, STAT operations, communications with the RDECOM headquarters, and all the administrivia needed to support you far from home (not the least of which was providing contacts for out next of kin). The FAST office brought in former STAT leads and MRMC MEDOs from Iraq to give us some background and provide a preview of the deployment process, which was helpful, if overly Iraq-focused. FAST would coordinate things like administrative support, phones, contracts, and other back room support to enable us to operate.

Next up at Belvoir was the parade of nations. We got a visit and in-brief from a huge number of technology organizations involved in support of the war. This included organizations like JIEDDO and the Army Rapid Equipping Force (REF), both of which we would have a lot of involvement with in theater. PEO Soldier, based at Belvoir, gave us an overview of their programs – Soldier equipment, body armor, small arms, and so on. Then we visited the Night Vision and Electronics Sensors Division (NVESD) of the Communications and Electronics Research, Development, and Engineering Center (CERDEC). CERDEC NVESD, also known colloquially as Night Vision Labs, is the home of Army night sights, lasers, and a wide range of electronic sensors. With limited time, we got at best an overview of the projects they were working on, the primary idea being to have a gist of what was available, and to know whom to contact when we needed help down range.

Though the focus was on Army R&D efforts, perhaps to the detriment of the other services, we did establish some contacts with Navy, Marine, and Air Force organizations while in the Fort Belvoir area. This was ultimately to grow to become a stronger relationship through the course of my tour.

Departing Belvoir, we headed to Adelphi, Maryland, and part of the Army Research Lab (ARL). ARL does a lot of basic research in everything from human factors, to electronics, to armor, lethality and survivability. In theory, they provide technology that the engineering centers then mature before the technology is passed to the program offices in the PEOs to execute. In practice, all of the engineering centers and labs are reaching forward to find ways to support the soldier in the field, sometimes competing with each other to get their preferred solution out to the field faster. ARL had been designated lead for a number of sensor and counter-IED projects, despite being the basic research organization.

We followed up ARL Adelphi with ARL at Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG), which is better known as the home of the Army’s Developmental Test Command, which does basic engineering testing on all Army equipment. At an APG sub-installation known as Edgewood Arsenal we visited the Edgewood Chemical-Biological Center (ECBC), where chem-bio protective gear and sensors are developed. Oddly ECBC has a lot of modeling and simulation capability in other fields, and even had a Prototype Integration Facility (PIF) that was busy converting 5-ton trucks into training vehicles for the big Buffalo IED detection trucks. It turned out that the Tank & Automotive RDE Center (TARDEC)