How much does a video surveillance system cost for ADT or Brinks?

Why does the military fail to integrate aid as part of a combined strategy?

• While flying over Helmand Afghanistan for about the 200th time (I'm slow but persistent) it suddenly struck me that if we renovated the Afghan's farms (something we should be doing anyway) nearly all the cover the Taliban depended on (firewood treelines, open irrigation ditches, cornfields, mud walls, etc.) would be gone, leaving the Taliban with literally no place to hide from our surveillance blimps, drones, helicopters, etc. This would be ten times cheaper. I thought this spark would ignite a big change in policy, where the main metric of aid would be how much it reduced military action that cost far more and created blow-back. Instead, the military and numerous other government/NGOs either don't get it (sheesh!) or see the rewards to them aren't worth the risk of saying our baby is ugly. I have lots of ideas, none of them very comfortable. For those interested (everyone should be - please send this around) Here is my article on the subject:    A New Exit Tactic for Afghanistan - The Magnificent Seven   Read the papers and you will see (to no great surprise) that we have no clear exit strategy for Afghanistan. Due to a long series of coincidences that started in Afghanistan back in 2011, I noticed that five common farmstead improvements were not only essential to Afghanistan’s development, but they provided security benefits that were dozens of times greater per dollar.   The Taliban have persisted tactically because they can hide amongst Afghanistan's obsolete rural maze of tree lines, ditches, mud walls and cornfields. That's why they only really fight in the summer. As we have come to rely more on airpower, the enemy relies more on concealment. Consider how Iraq I was a turkey shoot in the open desert. Urban cover made Iraq II untenable. So I thought I would add a new tactic to our grand strategy.   It isn’t just that the means to remove this cover are so cheap, or that they are permanent. Final victory is only when Afghanistan rises up one rung on the ladder--from total basket case to the kind of country you don’t have to conquer just to clean out a terrorist camp. We may be up to our ass in alligators, but the only way out is to drain the swamp.   First let’s consider Iraq. What was really “The Surge" that got us out? Our two year surge added 17,000 additional troops, to a brief peak of 158,000. Simultaneously we hired 80,000 members of the Sons of Iraq (aka SOI, Sunni awakening or Sahwa). Many of them had been fighting against us. Our modern military requires lots of support troops. So there were probably more Sahwa in the streets than US troops. They cost about one percent of what US troops did: $300 a month each. Without them, who would we have handed the ball to?   The local tribes in Afghanistan aren’t powerless. They stood up to the Taliban when they took in a Navy Seal who was the lone survivor of a Taliban attack. Yes, Afghanistan is too fractious for a broad SOI solution. But that doesn’t mean we can’t harness the power of millions of Afghanis by making it easier for them to defend their farms and villages.   Afghanistan is like an old western movie. Feuding families struggle to get by in the river valleys of a desert country full of roving gunmen, smugglers and other crooks, overseen by corrupt lawmen and judges bought off by rich businessmen. Good cops fight bad guys and good guys fight bad cops in wild shootouts. Just replace horses and wagons with 125cc dirt bikes and trucks.   Our efforts so far could be seen as just pumping more guns and money into the top of a country. The new wave of successful aid programs start from the bottom. For example, a 50 dollar micro-loan can buy a cell phone and create a village pay phone business. Five of the tools in this plan are rural modernization tools already expanding across the region. The sixth is non-lethal equipment. The last is firearms. In the movie "The Magnificent Seven", seven gunslingers help a Mexican village defend themselves against a gang of banditos. Hence, this seemed like a natural title for seven hardware fixes to help Afghani villagers defend themselves.    Speaking of wars with bad exits, Afghanistan has many parallels to Vietnam. According to the Secretary of Defense who ran Vietnam (Robert McNamara) the foremost lesson was we failed to see things through the eyes of the impoverished peasant farmer. We fooled ourselves into believing the peasants would join us in the fight against communism. We never stopped to ask if we were giving them anything worth fighting for - aside from a brutal foreign puppet dictatorship. A million of them had starved to death in 1945. For many of those who had so little to live for, utopian promises of Communism seemed worth dying for. If we gave them lives worth fighting for, they would have fought the commies for us. So let's look at this from the eyes of an Afghani farmer who just wants to grow more food and get less trouble from Al-Qaeda zealots, local thugs, or corrupt police or soldiers.   Ahmad Khan's wife is cutting some cooking fuel wood from the thick tree lines over the thigh deep irrigation ditches around their tiny farm fields. She cooks over an open fire outdoors or an unvented mud stove indoors. The smoke gives her and the children respiratory problems.   Ahmad heads out to work on the ditches. The walls cave in when the earth is either too wet or too dry. The primitive flood irrigation is labor intensive and loses much water. He walks around the outer mud wall that keeps his sheep contained. He sighs noticing how it will soon need an overhaul.   The Taliban really appreciate all his work. The dense tree grid acts like a subway system, hiding them from the American blimps, drones, and helicopters. The enemy typically doesn’t clearly spot them, so most fire is hosing down the section of tree line they are in. If they hit the bottom of the ditch as the first rounds impact, they typically escape unharmed.  The thick mud walls can absorb much of the blast from a Hellfire Missile. The walls also allow them to sneak up from the fields and seize the houses before they are noticed.   Ahmad’s corn crop is about two feet tall. In a couple months, the Taliban can hide in it. With little warning, no way to quickly alert the local tribesmen, and only one AK-47 for his family, there is little Ahmad can do. He wishes for a more modern farm, but he can’t get any of the things modern farmers have, such as crop insurance or cheap loans. He wishes the Americans would stop talking about helping and actually do something around here besides blow up stuff.   The following are seven permanent hardware solutions for farmers like Ahmad to gain more prosperity and security. None of this is theoretical or unproven. How would anyone argue against more food or less shelter for the enemy, or a better ability to defend your home? Consider that similar irrigated desert land in California's Central valley sells for $10,000 an acre. Afghanistan has the world's cheapest labor. Consider the investment opportunities if the situation improves like it has been in every other formerly rock bottom country. Even Somalia is finally looking up.   1. Efficient Cookstoves: $10 will subsidize a standalone cookstove or set of lightweight insulating firebricks for a mud stove. This will eliminate the need for nearly half the tree lines. These can be manufactured at regional brick mills, creating a sustaining enterprise.   2. Crop Waste to Cooking Fuel Briquette Mills: For about the cost of operating one helicopter, dozens of these mills could supply all of Afghanistan's remaining cooking fuel needs. Current mills are relatively expensive, high pressure industrial hard briquette presses. There is every reason to believe that an inexpensive press that uses stove heat and hand or animal power could quickly turn stalks into low grade “stove sticks”. The 2 billion people who still cook with wood are waiting.   3. Basic dry land irrigation systems. Simple irrigation pumps and tubing would eliminate the need for ditches. Water now blowing away in the desert wind would be put to use.   4. Cash crops instead of corn. Aside from sheltering Taliban, corn is the last crop you should grow on land like this. Simply growing soybeans would address their protein deficiency problem.   5. Wire fencing instead of mud walls; and other farmstead defense improvements. Like the movie, the locals need help turning the local compounds into - well into the kind of farmstead/mini fort you would want if you lived there.   The power of these 5 improvements can be magnified manifold by applying them in concert in strips that radiate and connect villages and police outposts. This creates clear lines of observation/fire. This is rather like hunting deer under the power lines or along a railroad cut.   6. 911. Cheap wireless intercom or radio systems would give the Afghanis the ability to rally the family and entire clan at a moment's notice without making noise. A village cell phone would let them alert the authorities anonymously. Then there are all the other things that a clan militia would want, such as medical supplies.   7. More Firepower. The improving economics and infrastructure (and our departure) will provide more work and fewer reasons to fight. It seems prudent to provide frangible ammunition for their AK-47s that would be more lethal to the Taliban, but couldn’t penetrate soft body armor worn by soldiers or police. Another option is to provide rifles chambered for light rounds such as the 22 magnum rim fire or 9mm.   These should all be combined into a program that will support much of the cost. The key is eliminating waste and then using this new surplus to generate capital to eliminate more waste. This sort of thing is doing quite well (finally) across much of the world. The poorest of the poor are no longer starving on a dollar a day, but scraping by on a few dollars a day.   Crop waste now being piled and burned could be carted to a briquette pelletizer. The surplus briquettes supply the market for city dwellers now burning coal or other expensive fuel trucked in. Water wasted on growing trees and poor irrigation can be used to create cash crop farms just outside the present irrigated areas.   The farmers who provide biomass or work the new fields would be paid not with cash but with Irrigation tubing, wire fencing, supplies to reinforce their compounds and other dual benefit goods. They could sell these for cash to other farmers, creating a distribution network. Taliban have little interest in robbing the farmer of materials. This won’t eliminate theft and corruption, but it is a lot harder for capital to flow up out of the country when it is in the form of bundles of wire or bags of cement. Nearly all the progress can be measured from sales at the mills and markets or via aircraft, so very few of our people need to set foot in the IED laden countryside.   Now consider the military effects of this just like the “Sunni Awakening”. Each deployed troop costs approximately one million dollars per year or 100,000 stoves. The cost of one company of troops could supply enough stoves, mills, tubing and other assistance to eliminate the treelines, ditches and cornfields that allow the Taliban to tie up a full division of front line soldiers.   “The Surge” was a combination domestic sales pitch and foreign military strategy that allowed us to moon-walk out of Iraq. The Magnificent Seven plan is simply acknowledging that in this rare case, the kind of programs that have been spreading prosperity across Africa and Asia can deliver billions of dollars’ worth of security as a fringe benefit. This is an exit strategy that is real.   I'm no aid expert, just a rescue helicopter pilot. All I know started from flying 220 medevac missions into the Upper Helmand Valley in Sumer of 2011. But flying below treetop level lets you suck up vast swaths of information you don’t see at conferences, such as the expression on their faces. I saw how they burn off all their crop waste, for example. We got shot at frequently, usually from tree covered ditches.   Thanks to the internet (CNN's Maps of the fallen, Google earth and YouTube) you can see the places we landed the most, an aerial view of the rat's maze that is the Upper Helmand, and helmet cam video of all the tree line to tree line fighting.    If I would have been one of the real experts, I probably would be reciting the liturgical talking points the PowerPoint monks created. When I saw a recent article about DARPA's program for a new battlefield internet I had to laugh and wipe away a tear. The picture was very familiar. Four soldiers were up to their armpits in corn, in front of a wall which had a tree line behind it. I'm sure they were thinking: "The first thing this place needs is internet connectivity!".    I certainly got to see the results of an enemy who was able to hide amongst the trees, corn, ditches, mud walls, and houses. These houses were abandoned by the locals because they couldn't be defended. I'm thinking we should be aiming towards a day soon where a "Magnificent 7,000" of aid and security specialists write a script where we American gunslingers can ride off into the sunset and go back home for good.     Troop Levels in the Afghan and Iraq Wars, FY2001-FY2012: Cost and Other Potential Issues http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40682.pdf

• Answer:

  Afghanistan needs trees, irrigation ditches, cornfields and mud walls. In addition, the Taliban hides in plain sight - you can't tell always tell a Talib just from looking at him. What's killing Afghanistan isn't the Taliban - it's corruption.