Military Review English Edition January-February 2014 | Page 71

LESSONS LEARNED

Army officers in any theater harbor within the
back pages of their field notebooks lessons worthy
of consideration by others. These are lessons
learned from experience rather than academic study.
In Afghanistan, certain lessons consistently have
emerged as essential to the effectiveness of New
Zealand Defense Force operations—and possibly
to the operations of coalition partners now and in
the future. Future counterinsurgency (COIN) and
stability missions likely will be similar to the costly
but worthy efforts in Afghanistan in the past decade.
Therefore, broad lessons such as these, when proven
over time, should lead to improvements to military
education and training.

New Zealand Defense Forces in
Bamyam Province
For New Zealand Defence Force operations in
Afghanistan, the largest contribution—in terms of
number of personnel and continuity over time—has
been to the Afghan people of the Bamyan province. Afghanistan comprises 33 provinces and a
multitude of cultures not necessarily limited to the
borders of Afghanistan.
The Bamyan Province is distinctive, in part,
because of its predominantly Hazaran population.
Across South Asia and the Middle East, this province is considered the Hazaran heartland. Bamyan
is isolated geographically from other population
groups because it resides within the Hindu Kush,
a long mountain range in southwest Asia. Most
Hazaran people actively pursue a peaceful existence for themselves and their children. Hence,
the military casualties in Bamyan over a decade,
while regrettable, were many fewer than those in
other provinces: about 20 members of the Afghan
National Security Force and eight New Zealand
Defence Force personnel lost their lives.
The New Zealand Defence Force led the provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in Bamyan
continuously from 2003 to 2013, mainly with
New Zealand Army units—more than 3,500 New
Zealand Defence Force personnel served. These are
small figures compared with other nations but large
for New Zealand forces. From 2003 to 2013, 21
contingents served six- to seven-month rotations.2
All New Zealand team members, no doubt,
gained valuable insights that contributed to effective mission accomplishment. The ten lessons
MILITARY REVIEW

January-February 2014

highlighted for consideration here are dedicated
to those who paid the ultimate price while serving
in Bamyan.
Lesson 1: Success in contemporary conflict
depends on applying counterinsurgency principles and lessons effectively. COIN principles
are the new standard for complex problem-solving,
for military and civilian efforts. COIN conducted in
Afghanistan is the graduate level of contemporary
conflict. The New Zealand Defence Force found that
all warfighting functions and battlefield operating
systems faced significant challenges over the decade
of its commitment to Bamyan. This was, in part,
because those functions and systems were based on
past operations. However, the nature of operations
in Afghanistan is significantly different from major
conventional operations and two-dimensional conflicts of the past.
New Zealand forces in Afghanistan applied principles, tactics, techniques, and procedures not only
from U.S. Army doctrine, but also from British
army doctrine. They experienced first-hand the joint,
interagency, and multinational aspects of operations
described in U.S. Army operational and COIN doctrine. The doctrinal publications used in this author’s
education and training were published between 2008
and 2010. Though valuable, they were not always
adequate to guide operations.
Forces need to seek out lessons learned in Afghanistan and determine how those lessons apply to current
operations. Soldiers should resist the temptation to
apply established principles by rote because those
principles may not account for their situation. They
should exercise judgment to determine how they will
integrate and synthesize lessons learned with their
education and training.
Lesson 2: The long-term success of the host
nation frames all phases of military operations.
For a COIN or stabilization mission to be successful, military forces must focus first on the success of
the host nation. They must adopt a selfless attitude
as they conduct their missions. More specifically,
soldiers, leaders, and units must look beyond their
own missions and aim to make others successful.
Much current training and education remains
rooted in the seize initiative operational phase
(phase III of joint operational phases). Experiences in Bamyan showed that if forces focused
the majority of their efforts in phase III, they
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