Goals

It's good to have a goal.  Setting goals for yourself gives you a mark on the wall to reach towards, and measure progress against.  Getting measurably closer to that end-state validates the hard work you're putting in, and spurs you on to greater gains.  And after you meet the mark, set a new one, bigger and better than the first.  Simple self-motivation.

The real trick to setting a goal is that you have to write it down.  You have to make it a public announcement, even with an audience of one (i.e., yourself).  In needs to be short, succinct, and specific, so you can't change your mind as to what it meant at some later date.  Tack that sucker up on your door, refrigerator, office wall.  Write it on your bathroom mirror with a grease pencil and don't erase it 'til you succeed so you have to look at it every morning.  When you start to slack off, or get complacent, or decide that your current state of affairs is good enough, you can look at that cold, hard fact, staring at you accusingly, and be reminded of what you were trying to accomplish.  You can't give up without settling, admitting that you were deceiving yourself into thinking you could do better.  And that just can't stand.  Unless you're a low down, dirty...deceiver.  (A cookie for you if you can spot where that came from.)

The Coalition's overall goals in Afghanistan are very nebulous.    There's a lot of wiggle room when evaluating whether or not Afghanistan is "secure" enough for us to relinquish the lead.  What qualifies as a "professional" Army and Police force?  This ambiguity makes these goals difficult to achieve.  One general's definition of secure will certainly be different than another reporter's definition.  The President and the American people may see "success" from very different (and current polling data suggests that this is the case).  Thankfully, I don't have to deal with this ambiguous mess in my job.  That's above my pay grade.  No, in stark contrast, NTM-A/CSTC-A's goals are rather specific. 

NTM-A is responsible for building that "professional" Army and Police force, and we have very specific goals we must fulfill in order to be considered a success.  The Army must reach an end-strength of 171,600 soldiers by October 2011.  The Police must reach an end-strength of 134,000 by the same date.  These numbers can't just be made up of any Joe Schmo, either.  The ration of Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers, and Soldiers/Patrolmen is specified, so as to achieve the best balance of leadership and grunt work in the force.

Underpinning these strength goals are several other goals.  Training, for example.  We have to put each one of these guys through training.  That's where the "professional" part of the force comes from.  We can't just hand these guys AK-47s, slap em on the back, throw em into the fray and expect quality results (though at points in the past, that is exactly what happened).  As such, we have to build and adequate amount of training facilities, hire enough trainers, and design courses long enough to be effective, but short enough to meet our personnel demands in the force.  Recruiting is another.  We have our target end-strength, now we need to go find the people to get us there.  Obviously we can't recruit 134,000 people all at once for the Police, so we set monthly goals that need to be met consistently.  High goals are set in the winter, when there's no other work to be had, and low goals are set in late summer and fall, when the harvest time and Ramadan occur (though Ramadan is really a moving target).  The big goal is attrition.  We know a certain amount of people are going to leave the force, but we have monthly goals that we work our tails off trying to meet so that we can keep the losses to a minimum.

All of these goals are interconnected, some easier to meet and maintain than others.  If the recruiters have a bad month, attrition needs to be lowered to compensate, while training space stays empty.  If we can't build training sites fast enough, recruiting all the guys in the world won't help, as they'll get tired of waiting for class space and go find another job.  If attrition gets out of hand, we're throwing money away training people that aren't doing the job they were hired for, and putting unbelievable pressure on the recruiters to find more people to fill all the vacated positions.  The cycle is brutal and unforgiving.

As an analyst, one of the things I get to work on is nailing down exactly what each of these goals should be.  We may have money to build training space to house 100,000 people simultaneously, but do we need to spend all of it?  Having 2,000 classroom spaces for new policeman isn't helpful if the recruiters are only going to be able to snag 200 new people.  Bleeding 70% of the force each year (an actual attrition rate for the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP) at one point) isn't conducive to growing the Police to larger and larger numbers, but can we get away with 30%?  Where does the break point occur between acceptable and unsustainable?

There's also just as much art as there is science when developing goal numbers.  Maybe we can get away with 30% attrition, but instead set the goal at 20% to motivate the Afghans to do even better, while simultaneously sending a message to the American public and Congress that we're striving to do better.  Setting the recruiting goal at a high mark during a challenging month might be silly from a mathematical perspective, but may motivate the recruiters to work harder than ever that month.  These numbers become the marks by which we are held accountable, visible to anyone that picks up a newspaper or surfs the internet, and send a message about our level of effort and our confidence in our work.  It's important that these goals be both meaningful and challenging. 

And in reality, all of these are moving targets.  The only fixed goals are the overall end-strengths of 171,600 for the Army and 134,000 for the Police.  Everything else is variable, and changed fairly frequently.  The best analogy I can think of is an Etch-a-Sketch controlled by two people.  Imagine trying to draw a straight line from one corner to the other with two people, one controlling one knob, one controlling the other.  As one person turns their knob, the other must adjust to compensate.  Both knobs are being adjusted at the same time, and they have to be adjusted precisely, and in concert with the each other, to succeed in the task.  For our problem in Afghanistan, this happens every day, little fine tunings to try and keep us on the glide path to that final end-strength goal.  Training classes get extended as our training capacity increases, so that we can pack on even more education before sending fresh faces to the force.  Recruiting is usually low at the same time attrition is high, resulting in adjustment of the recruiting goals for the following months.  While the overall goal for attrition hasn't changed in almost a year (fixing that is a project I'm working on right now), efforts to reduce attrition, like better pay, guaranteed vacation, and better leadership, are usually implemented as a result of losing too many people in the months prior.

Knobs on the Etch-a-Sketch, all primed and ready to be tweaked to whatever value is necessary.  The target is steady, we just have to communicate efficiently and coordinate our efforts.  We're all working towards nailing that target dead on.

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Speaking of writing goals down, it's about time for me.

I came over here with plans to get in better shape, read my Bible more, and writing on my blog.  So far I've done pretty well with all of those (though some of you may disagree about the blog frequency!), but I haven't set my goals in stone so that I can be held accountable.  Well, here they are.

- Bench press 200 lbs 6 times (consecutively, no loop holes) before the end of my tour.  Currently I can do 185 about twice.  My office mates and I have been weight lifting 6 days a week, and they're pretty good about holding my feet to the fire, so I've got a good shot to make this one, I think.
- Finish reading and journaling through Psalms.  I planned before I left to read one Psalm each night and write down my thoughts about what I read.  So far, I've been in Afghanistan for more than two months and I'm not quite into the 30s yet.  /wristslap.  I've got more than 100 days left, so I can still make it if I double up for a little while.  This one will be the hardest, as my normal quiet time (night) has a lot of distractions, like talking to family, surfing the internet, blogging....
- Make it to every day of Insanity.  We're starting Day 1 of 60 on Saturday.  I stand a better chance at this than I did P90X because it's at 0630 instead of 0530, and I am NOT a morning person.
- Blog once a week, on average, and keep gaps between posts to less than 10 days.  If I've already missed this one, don't tell me, I don't want to know.

- Brief General Petraeus.  This one is largely out of my hands, but I've already narrowly missed the opportunity twice, so I'm hopeful.  If I keep producing quality analysis, I think I'll get there.

There.  Now they're public.  Time to get to work.


*****


One last thing: if anyone has specific requests for something they'd like me to take a picture of, let me know.  I'm planning a picture-heavy blog post in the near-future, and want to incorporate your requests.  It doesn't have to be a specific request.  I can have fun interpreting something nebulous.  As long as it doesn't violate security measures, or isn't next to impossible to obtain (don't ask me to take a picture of Petraeus eating or anything), I'll do my best.  It'll be a fun little scavenger hunt for me, and hopefully satisfy some of your curiosity about Afghanistan.


Until next time.  Out here.