What’s the secret to packing up and shipping out a small city? Planning. And lots of it. Long before BGen Charles Lamarre landed at the Kandahar Airfield (KAF) in July of this year as commander of the final rotation of Operation Athena, he spent almost 18 months planning and rehearsing how to dismantle and stow every vehicle, billet and bullet.
Kandahar might not have resembled an episode of Hoarders, but after almost six years in that theatre the Canadian Forces had accumulated the equivalent of over five million square feet of building material across 18 compounds and 30,000 tones of vehicles, to say nothing of the kilometres of wiring and IT infrastructure, a hospital and even a Tim Horton’s.
All of it had to be counted, categorized, decontaminated – no small measure when dealing with sand – and then prioritized and packed, mostly into some 2,700 sea containers, and trucked 1600 kilometres to the port of Karachi.
Unlike the theatre in Haiti – stood up rapidly in response to an earthquake – or the staging area in the United Arab Emirates – closed with little warning following a disagreement with the UAE government – Lamarre and his team had “the luxury of time to plan.” In 2010, they knew that combat operations would cease by July 2011 and they would then have six months in which to close the theatre.
But it wasn’t without its complications. Mission closure is normally a logistics task, led by Canadian Operational Support Command. However, because Kandahar remained an active theatre and part of Lamarre’s responsibility as commander of the Mission Transition Task Force (MTTF) involved transferring materiel to the Force’s training mission near Kabul, the operation remained under the authority of Canadian Expeditionary Force Command.
“Right from the word go, both CEFCOM and OSCOM were involved in the planning,” he said. “We had the ability to gather the team and start planning this in early 2010 and, as a result, we were able to go through a very deliberate process of how we would do mission closure.”
Like many things in the military, the task began with a committee. Co-chaired by OSCOM and CEFCOM and given the acronym MIB – Materiel and Infrastructure Board, not Men in Black – the committee included representation from the army, air force, navy and special forces as well as from the Assistant Deputy Minister branches of Materiel, Information Management and Infrastructure and Environment. From quarterly meetings, the committee soon progressed to a monthly gathering examining everything that was known to be in theatre. “That gave us the ability to create a specific instruction that addressed all of the materiel by class and type,” Lamarre said.
His planning headquarters also had the luxury of meeting with individual stakeholders to establish their specific requirements. As an example, Lamarre said meetings with the army’s staffs for operations, land force readiness, logistics, land equipment, and projects and management helped to determine “which vehicles were needed where, in what sequence, for what purpose. And that drove the priority of shipment out of theatre. In many cases, they’re going back to units that are going to go on the road to high readiness.”
Planning was soon followed by preparation, a training program well beyond basic soldiering skills. “Because we had so many specialized technicians as part of this task force, we sent guys off to get specialized skill sets,” Lamarre explained. “For example, we knew we were going to be relying on a significant air bridge through our C-17s and other large body aircraft, so the movement company and the soldiers that make that up in some instances went down to Trenton and trained on the C-17s.”
He took a similar approach in preparing to ship home tanks and other fighting vehicles with add-on armour. “We got some combat arms guys to work with our vehicle technicians to make sure we had the assembly lines to remove the add-on armour, clean it, inspect it and send it home. We actually set up a specific exercise in Edmonton and showed them the processes of how to do this. The first time we took the armour off one of our LAVs, it took three days. By the end of the exercise, they were doing it in three quarters of a day.” A secondary aspect of vehicle cleaning also included training a team to remediate any soil contaminated by fuel and oil spills.
To prepare to dismantle the many temporary hangers used to house aircraft and aviation elements at KAF, his team first set up and then took down actual hangers in an exercise “so we could get into that team building rhythm.”
“Ultimately, we had a host of exercises that brought us up to speed on how we were going to do mission closure,” Lamarre said. “Land Force Doctrine Training System adjusted their exercises to suite our specific mission. As part of the series of exercises, they validated my headquarters to make sure we were able to handle any sort of eventualities involving conflict, because we did have force protection elements and we had to do some convoys to bring in materiel. Second, though, they looked at what challenges we would be facing in terms of processing very large amounts of vehicles and materiel and made sure we did so in an environment that covered strategic lines of communication, such as with various Afghan ministries.”
Once in theatre, however, reality soon intruded. The Pakistan border closed periodically in response to U.S. attacks on insurgents in Pakistan territory, threatening the overland route to the port of Karachi and the thriving local trucking industry that has sprung up around KAF and other ISAF bases across the country. (As Vanguard went to press, several containers remained stuck in Afghanistan because of a Pakistani blockade of some routes.) And part way through the mission, the destination of the nightly flights of C-17s, Hercules and contracted Antonov aircraft switched from an intermediary staging terminal in Cyprus and to a new base in Kuwait.
Human connection
With all the focus on materiel, it is easy to forget that mission closure also includes the complex task of closing local human relationships. Over the course of the six-year mission, Op Athena issued approximately 7000 contracts and part of Lamarre’s assignment included establishing a cell to review every one. “We checked to make sure that we didn’t have anything outstanding that could some back and cause us grief, so proper verification and closure.” The MTTF maintained approximately 300 active contracts ranging from vehicle rentals to disposal services and fuel, all of which had to be closed off in the final months.
As was the case with his predecessors, Lamarre established a strong relationship with BGen Ahmad Habibi, commander of the Afghan National Army 1st Brigade 205 Corps, and as the task force identified materiel still useful for a military but not worth returning to Canada, it was transferred to 205 Corps. Working with the U.S.-created Humanitarian Assistance Yard, a surplus materiel depot designed to help battalion commanders in Regional Command South deliver specific items to local villages to assist in operating schools, shelters or other community projects, MTTF provided such things as canvas from tents. “That can assist not only security forces but also Afghan NGOs and battle space owners as they try to convince villagers to stay on the right path,” he said.
Lesson sharing
Before deploying, the mission headquarters also made a point of speaking with Dutch colleagues who had recently closed down their Afghan mission. Like the Canadians, the Dutch used a combination of planes and overland truck routes through Pakistan to move out materiel. “We talked about issues and challenges,” Lamarre confirmed. “Things were being attacked, fuel specifically, so they lost a couple of sea containers. So tracking and visibility was very important to be able to say quickly what was in those sea containers. We already had a plan to ensure asset-tracking visibility, but it reinforced our thinking. Each time we see an ally doing something well, we shamelessly steal their good ideas. I think we benefited from the Dutch and what our British colleagues did coming out of Iraq. We also benefited from what the Americans did coming out of Iraq, their first tranches. Interestingly, we’re getting the reverse knock on the door – they are looking to us and asking the same kinds of questions.”
While OSCOM has a permanent lessons learned team, Lamarre created his own cell specifically to capture the lessons of what was the largest mission closure since the Korean War. “At the end we’ll put out a consolidated lessons report, a how-to for mission closure. And we are also looking at establishing the underpinnings of doctrine for mission closure. We have access to a whole number of documents from experiences we’ve had closing down other theatres, but because of the common threads with our allies, it would probably be worthwhile to put together one doctrinal publication at a NATO level.”
As for the lessons he’d impart to others, Lamarre said the most important remains planning. “If you have the luxury of early planning, then you have the chance to bring together your stakeholders. Everybody has input into mission closure. It’s vehicles and materiel but also information management, the environment, contracts, and communications infrastructure and telephony. You need to get everybody together and sequence how you are going to do your business. And once you get into execution, you have to be ready to react to change. Finally, don’t disregard strategic communications. As you are exiting or transitioning, you need to be conscious about the people you’re leaving behind. If you can assist them as you’re drawing down, it is time well spent.”