captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 the a.n.a. special operations forces continue to grow and increase our operational proficiency. for example, a.n.a. soft led operations increased from 44% in january to 54% in april. as we plan for a responsible drawdown of our forces in afghanistan, the ansf will continue to face challenges on the battlefield, but they won't face these challenges alone. to support the ansf during transition, asaf is shifting to a new model, that puts afghans

in a lead combat role and has asaf roles increasing assuming a trained a viz and assist role. during this transition period asaf will still fight alongside our afghan partners when needed but we'll shift into more of a support role as the afghans move to the front. ansf operational challenges include logistics, army and police interoperability and confidence among others. in my own opinion ansf's greatest challenge is one of confidence. our agreement to stand with them beyond 2014 has been a tremendous boost to their confidence. the will of their force will strengthen as their leadership strengthens and as their capabilities improve and as they continue to move more and more to the front. certainly back to the bottom line, we assess that our security strategy, our security transition is on track to have a

sufficient and sustainable ansf assume full responsibility for security across afghanistan by the end of 2014. finally, thank you all for the work that you do on behalf of our servicemen and women as well as your efforts to ensure their protection and safety as they complete their mission in afghanistan. i stand ready to answer your questions. >> thank you, major general townsend, i appreciate your testimony. we'll begin with questioning and i want to begin with mr. sedney to get your opinions. we spoke with general allen just last week, ambassador crocker about some consider about the more difficult areas of transition to tranche five, i know there's repositioning to put some of the difficult areas into tranche three. if you do not achieve the desired results in this transition, whether it's tranche three, four, or five, are there

contingency plans? we know 2014 is the complete turnover. are there contingency plans, alternative schedules, if goals aren't met and transition doesn't take place smoothly in some of the more challenging areas in afghanistan, can you give us your perspective as you see those contingency areas and alternate schedules? >> thank you very much, congressman, thank you and your colleagues for making the trip out to afghanistan to speak directly with our commanders and our troops and our afghan partners. in terms of plans for how we're going to evaluate the success of transition and how we might adjust the existing campaign plan, the process that we have in place is one where at the end of this fighting season, after an -- including after the remainder of u.s. surge forces are returned home at the to end of september, general allen and

his staff will review what happened over this year. as i said in my testimony and as i'm sure you heard out this, this is going to be a testing sum for the afghan security forces. we'll have to evaluate them. at the same time beginning in three weeks the third tranche of transition will be started including in some very difficult, contested areas. general allen will have this summer's experience to evaluate that. he'll do that and submit a report up the chain of command, evaluating what he believes are what the future requirements are. so, rather than developing a holistic contingency plans, what we're focusing on is making what we're doing now successful and we have a review process in place whereby the commander in the field will evaluate if there are changes that are necessary. he'll recommend those up the chain of command to centcom and

the secretary and president. that's the process we are looking for. i will say, you've been in afghanistan more recently than i have been, but i'll be back in five days and looking at that, as general allen said in his testimony and we'll find out as we go out there, and afghans are often doing better than expected. this are cases that they aren't doing as either we have expected or they and that's where we're able to give them the additional help that we need. we're also, as i said, seeing places doing better than expected. we have very aggressive and very positive things, afghan commanders who are pushing to do even more than sometimes we think they're ready to. that's a judgment that our commanders out in the field have to make every day about whether people are ready to do things, if you stretch too far, that can be dangerous, but if you don't

stretch far enough, you're not going to achieve your goal. so, we do have this review process in place for this year. i'd expect we'd have the same process in place. i'd also add in terms of the issue of the composition of the afghan security forces, secretary pineta in his formal meetings with the afghan interior defense ministers in april formed a group called the security consultive forum where we meet and discuss the strategic level issues relating to the afghan stuart forces. they agreed to a six-month review process to evaluate what additional inputs might be needed, what changes might be needed so, again, we have these review processes in place that we take very seriously and look forward to being able to come back and brief you and your colleagues as the review processes are completed. >> thank you. major general townsend, we know right now the majority of efforts there are along the lines of village stabilization

operations and that most of that's being executed by our special operators. as we begin to draw down forces to the 68,000 by the end of 2013, the question is, is that transition going to take place in a way to make sure that support elements are in place to make sure our special operators continue to have what they need as they get placed more and more out on an ihand to pursue these operations? the concern is if it isn't strategic in the way the drawdown is structured that those special operators may not have what they need, whether it's air support or other logistical support and may find themselves on an island. can you speak to that issue? is the planning taking into account strategically where we'll be and continuing to pursue the fight especially in lines with the village operations and the special operators and ansf forces in these areas? >> yes, sir. as you might expect, we're planning for various

contingencies through now until 2014 and even respond 2014 what we call our enduring presence might look like. and none of those plans have really firmed up yet. but the vso, village stability operations and after gghan loca police is a very high priority for asaf. absolutely i can assure you that the planning will allow for the proper support that those hardy little bands of special operations folks and also general purpose forces out on the frontier where the sites are at, the support will be there for them. vso/aop is part of the continuing presence planning, we envision the program continuing after 2014. so, even in our enduring presence footprint there will be vso/aop support and support to those forces providing it. >> thank you. with that i'll move mr. andrews.

>> thank you. i thank the witnesses for your testimony. mr. secretary, you indicated that afghan security forces participate in 90% of operations and are in the lead in 40%. what's the difference between being in the lead and participating? >> i'm going to call a little bit on my -- on my uniformed colleague here because he's a lot more accustomed to describing operations than i would say. but i think to me one of the key things when i hook at when i look at reports from my uniformed colleagues on this, when the issue comes to lead, are they lead in planning the operation not just do they lead in carrying it out, but do they have the capacity to plan, do they execute according to plan and then afterwards do they have the capabilities to do an after-action review to see what went wrong, what went right in order to do it the next time better. i'll defer a little bit on that

to you, steve. >> general, what would that look like? >> i'll use a very kind of simple analogy of a patrol. a patrol gets a mission and they meet together, the first thing they do is they plan that mission. when the afghans are in the lead, they're planning the mission. we're kind of helping and advising. just a short while ago, almost every mission in afghanistan would have been planned by an american sergeant or officer. when that patrol rolls out the gate, who's leading that patrol, who's actually in front and who is in the command position. a short while ago that would have been an american. now increasingly and actually the latest reports are more than 40%, they're in the mid to high 50% range. half of those patrols are now led by afghan leader with an american leader tagging along behind watching the afghan leader control the operation. the force that's on the patrol,

what's predominance of the force. in a recent report said 61% of the troops on a mission these days and rcs are afghans, that was not the case when i was there a little a year ago in rc east. on the objective, who is actually giving the orders and who is controlling the soldiers as they move about the objective, increasingly in more than half the cases now that's an afghan, that's the difference between helping and leading. >> very helpful. >> can i add in one thing, sir? >> i want to ask the next question. what's the difference between a unit that's independent with an adviser and effective with an adviser? what's the difference? >> effective with an adviser is really a matter of degree. if you're an effective with an adviser, you're getting a lot of advice, and if you're independent of an adviser, you're getting much less advice. but the big difference is who's

generating the operations. >> got you. >> if an afghan commander is saying, hey, we need to do an operation tomorrow and giving orders to an afghan subcommander, then they're generating the whole idea of the operation and so that's really the difference between being independent. >> this is not a trick question, but is it possible for an afghan unit to be not in the lead but be independent with an adviser, or is that oxymoronic? >> okay. i haven't really thought about this particular question. to be not in the lead -- >> put it to you this way. if an afghan unit is in the lead of an operation, with are they by definition effective or independent? >> they may be effective. >> are there afghans in the lead that don't hit the top two categories? >> yes, there are. >> are you concerned that american troops might be under the command of a commander of an outfit that isn't at least

effective? >> sir, american troops are not under the command of the afghan leader. they're partnered and on the battlefield together but there's an american leader there in charge of the american troops. >> do we have any data on the attrition rates among the afghan security forces? are they up or are they down? >> yes, we do have data which we'll be happy to provide the committee. we have some nice graphs. the answer is that those -- that the attrition is down in both the afghan national army and afghan national police over the last six months. happy to pass these graphs up to you, if you would like. >> sure. unanimous consent to put them in the record. >> we can do that. >> what's the bottom line, though? a year ago and what is it now? >> in the case of the afghan national police, a year ago attrition was ranging from 1.4% to 4.6%.

in the last six months it's raked from 3.4% in the most recent period 0.5%. >> what is the major reason for attrition? why do people leave? >> i'm going to defer a little bit of this to my colleague here, but a lot of the reasons, attrition are people that entered and leave before their contracts are up. the most common reason is family reasons. people have family problems at home and they feel they can't solve -- >> my time is about to expire. one thing if you have it, i'd be interested in the k.i.a. rates for afghan forces. i hope it's zero, god forbid, but what's happened with their k.i.a. rates, going up or down or staying the same? >> i don't know which way they're trending, but i do know that the army loses about twice -- they have a twice casualty rate that we do and the police have about four times the casualty rate that we do, so they are in this thing -- >> i offer no glee with that

statistic, by the way, i wanted to know what it was. i'm sure you don't either. thank you, this was very, very helpful. thank you for your testimony. >> we'll go to mr. conway. >> thank you. talking about tranche one, tranche two, tranche three, and what i ask is that we need a better way of measuring progress across that continuum of ineffective all the way to independent with adviser, whatever your scales are, either on a district by district basis or some sort of way to communicate progress in the transition. in other words, because you, mr. sedney, you said after the first two, that 50% of the population lives in -- under the control of the afghans which would say that we're done with transition in both tranche one or tranche two and i'm not sure that was accurate. maybe i just misunderstood it.

but we need some of the metrics that you're using to show yourselves progress, we need those, too, and any way you can be helpful in that regard, we're open to that. rob and i were over there last week and we had a presentation by the afghan commander on operations over the next several months and his ao that was as professional as anything we would get anywhere else by folks in our uniforms. this guy was very present. maybe it was just the interpreter knew what to do, but i suspect he was being interpreted correctly. i came out of that meeting very impressed with, you know, with this guy and the fact that he's going to be in charge here pretty soon. major general townsend, the aop, the numbers we're shown for post-2014 in terms of the numbers of security forces

versus the money that will be needed year in and year out to fund those, that the money to pay the aop is in the estimate of what the international community will have to come up each year to fund the security forces. but the force number itself, the 30,000 aop guys are not in the force number itself. my concern is -- i'm sold on this what we're doing with aops because the taliban's sold on it. they're threatening them, they're coming after them because they see them as a threat to their ability to operate within these villages. is there someone in the ministry of the interior who is going to take ownership of that aop and be the champion, i know we like it, but there's got to be somebody in the afghan system that is going to share that idea with us. are you aware, mr. sedney, or either one of you? >> first, i'd like to answer just the thing you said about the transition at the start.

those measurements are there. they're measurements through all the stages of transition. and to answer your sort of unasked question about, you know, has any place completed it, no. none of the tranche one or tranche two districts, provinces or municipalities have completed all four stages of transition yet. some of them are in stage three, and some of them -- a couple have entered stage four, but none of them have completed a transition. >> if you have that information, it will be helpful. >> sure. on your question of the aop versus the troop numbers is anybody going to take charge of that, first the troop numbers, you're correct, are not in the ansf in strength by design. the money, however, is. and what we anticipate funding in the out years international contributions. the moi, the ministry of inteefior, already owns the vso/aop program and there's a chain of command that runs

through the police chain of command and those aop forces are responsible to the district chief of police. so, there already is a funding, a training, funding, and equipping line who comes down the ministry of interior to the aop. >> the question is between the two of you are you all confident that the afghans sufficiently value this program that they won't siphon off that funding to go somewhere else with it after transition? >> i think two questions there. are we confident they won't siphon off the funding, yes, we're confident of that because we control that funding. so, that funding -- that funding right now does not go -- >> post-2014. >> post-2014 the aop program has been controversial in afghanistan. there are -- there is ownership with the ministry of interior. as the aop/vso program has proven its effectiveness, we're getting more and more support from the top levels there.

as that continues over the next two years i think we are very much on track for that, but it's certainly no secret that a number of high-ranking afghans in their parliament has been critical in the past with the aop program. to get the buy-in we'll need at least another year or two of success to build that support. bureaucratically as my colleague said, yes, in the ministry of interior there's a structure that governs the aop. right now that structure is -- we have a lot of mentors in that process, so we're building that capacity and we think we're on track to complete by 2014, but it's one of the things we'll be having in that review process. >> thank you, general. >> thank you, mr. conway. we'll now go to mr. critz. >> thank you, mr. chairman. general, you mentioned earlier something that i'd heard last year and the year before, the concern for attrition and the lack of ncos. and if you could, now secretary

mentioned that the attrition has gone from 4.4 -- in a range we'll say around 4.5 a year ago i believe to 3.4 a month ago. ranging down to half a percent. and just for comparison purposes, what -- in the u.s. military, what's our attrition rate? >> congressman, i don't know the answer to that question. i can tell you this about the afghan attrition, for the last -- we've got a goal of 1.4% per month. and they have -- the afghan army is about at that goal now. it's been declining, their attrition has been declining for the last several months. the police are actually at that goal and, in fact, i think they're slightly below the goal. they're meeting the goal, exceeding the goal now, the army's not quite there yet, but it's been on steady improvement, slope of improvement for the last several months. >> good. the police force was what i was

going to ask about next as well. but can you explain when you say that there's an issue with ncos, what exactly do you mean? >> first of all, there's just a shortage. about 17,000 ncos short in the army and about 11,000 ncos short in the police. >> so, 17,000. how many ncos do we have -- do they have and how many does that mean that they need? >> that's a good question. i don't know, i'll ask my colleagues here. >> 17,000 short of some number. >> yeah. i don't know that off the top of my head. >> okay. >> so, with the nco there's two real issues here, one is a cultural one. they've not been an army that had a special noncommissioned officer corps previously. so, you know, we're trying to, one, train the army and the senior leadership of the army to value noncommissioned officers. so, that's probably the broad

thing that's going on. then next is actually filling their ranks. and then they have standards for the noncommissioned officers, they have to be able to read, so that's one shortfall there we're working on. so, as these guys get recognized in the ranks there as a high performing soldier, they go to an nco school and they have to be able to read and they have to go to an nco course and pass that before they can be an nco. it's a work in progress filling these slots. >> the reason i asked, like i said, i heard the issue in years past, i was in afghanistan in the past and last year. with the growing amount of the force, has it remained a constant percentage of the lack of ncos or is it a number that has increased exponentially or are we seeing a sharp decline? we all know you have to have the sergeants on the ground because you're going to have some lack of -- or approaching chaos at

some point if you don't have the amount of people you need. as we transition here, i'm trying to find out will we have the ncos needed to support this 352,000 level or, as was discussed at the chicago summit in may, are we looking more at 230,000 number and where are we going with this? >> well, we will have the ncos we need because that's a focused area that we're trying to improve. we'll look at the data and we'll try to provide you an answer before the hearing's over, if not we'll provide it for the record. the general population of ncos. my guess sit probably remains probably pretty constant slightly improving because we've been growing the force, so it's hard to actually, you know, meet the objective when you're adding requirements which we've been doing. but we'll have the ncos we need to man and lead the 352,000 force. i'll let mr. sedney address where it goes from there.

>> just two additional points, congressman. the first is -- as steve stated, the reason they don't have enough ncos is just as in our forces and to be a really effective nco, you have to have 10 or 15 years of experience and this is an army that has generally less than five, so they'll grow into that. secondly on filling the ncos through the process that general townsend described, because we will have reached the numerical goals of the 352,000 by the end of this summer, that's going to give the afghan security forces two years from october 2012 to the end of 2014 to refine their quality, to build its nco corps to build the junior and midlevel officer corps. will the process be finished? no, we and others will remain to train and advise them after that, but they'll have the

beginnings of what they need in terms of numbers if not in fault by 2014 and the next two years is the period when we'll see the greatest progress in the nco and junior officers. >> thank you. >> thank you, mr. critz. we'll go to mr. coffman. >> thank you, mr. chairman. general townsend and secretary sedney, thanks so much for your service to our country. a couple points. first of all, i have a concern i think in looking back at u.s. military history and our involvement in south vietnam, one of the issues i think that complicated the efforts of the army of south vietnam was that we gave them our doctrine, and that was difficult to support after we left vietnam. and i was in afghanistan in november. and they took me out to see a training exercise, and it was

for artillery. and it was with toed artillery, having an an infantryman in the united states marine corps, why on earth have we procured for them this type of artillery. and when i pressed, he said, sir, karzai had insisted on heavier, more expensive -- he wanted f-16s and he wanted this and that and this type of artillery was the kind of compromise. i'm wondering how many areas like that that -- where we've given them weapons and tactics that don't fit their -- that aren't realistic as to their capability to maintain that after we're gone. and, general townsend, i wonder if you could reflect on that. >> yes, sir. i've actually seen that same artillery. i would point out that the u.s. army and the u.s. marine corps

today have a lot of that artillery and the afghans have had it for decades. so, it's nothing new and it's nothing out of character for the afghan army of the past or of the present. they do have mortars as well. they have light mortars and medium-caliber mortars much like we do. so, they have i think indirect fire systems that they can have high mobility with and then they have some that are less mobile, but i've seen them attach those, tow those -- >> remind this is the u.s. taxpayers expense and motors don't require all the expense that towed artillery does, so you and i obviously see differently about that. but let me ask you about my concern about the cultural corruption in the afghan security forces which is stunning. i pressed the oversights investigations committee under darrell issa to conduct an

investigation into the conduct of afghan security forces and the hack of oversight at the dawood military hospital where in part $42 million of u.s. military aid has been missing, unaccounted for, where the general officer in charge of that hospital was merely transferred, was never relieved, where afghan police and afghan soldiers were dying in the hospital for malnutrition and from a hack of medical care because the families couldn't come up with the necessary bribes. certainly it speaks to a lack of oversight for isaf personnel, the monitors, but also it speaks to not just the culture of corruption but also just the fact that to what extent have we formed the military organization that, i mean, how capable are they when they would allow this to