Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Afghanistan Has More Generals Than The U.S. MIlitary

Seventy three Afghan Army officers graduated from the Afghan Army Command and Staff College’s Command and General Staff College course. The mission is to provide professional military education for First Lieutenants to Major Generals (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Jeff Nevison)

Mujib Mashal, New York Times: Being an Afghan General Is Nice Work if You Can Get It. And Many Do.

Afghanistan may struggle to recruit enough soldiers for its armed forces, but it’s swimming in generals.

The country has close to 1,000 officers of general rank on its books — more than the United States, whose military is three times as large. And off the books? No one knows.

New names are added to the roster at a rate far out of proportion to battlefield realities, where the Afghan armed forces — the army, national police and intelligence forces, numbering 350,000 in all — have been steadily losing soldiers and territory to the Taliban. Meanwhile, retirements are rare.

The United States government, which picks up much of the tab for the Afghan military, can’t pin down the number of generals. “We still don’t know how many police and how many soldiers we’re paying salaries for,” said John F. Sopko, the United States special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction. “We don’t even know how many generals. It is pretty pathetic, and here we are, 15 years into this.”

It’s nice work if you can get it, with fairly good pay, fringe benefits and a pension. So how do you become an Afghan general?

Read more ....

WNU Editor: Afghanistan has about 1,000 Generals. There are about 900 U.S. Generals and Admirals .... Does The US Military Have Too Many Generals? (Task & Purpose).

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