Several people have asked me what I'm doing here in Afghanistan after spending the last five years working as a Mortgage Loan Officer. I served in the Marines for fifteen years, my last command being the S-4 (Logistics Officer) for the 8^th Marine Corps District in New Orleans, Louisiana. I left the USMC in 2000 and got my securities, insurance, real estate and mortgage licenses, and worked as a loan officer for Mercantile Mortgage in Plano, Texas until last month.

I like a little adventure from time to time, so I decided to take a year off from the mortgage business and go to work for MPRI in Afghanistan.

Let's see if I can explain what I’m doing here in Kabul.

I work for a company called MPRI. MPRI stands for Military Professional Resources, Inc. MPRI is an L-3 Communications company. It is considered by some to be a PMC, or Private Military Company. PMCs exist, in part, because of decades of reduced military budgets and troop numbers. As our politicians have reduced the number of uniformed military, the military has explored ways of coping. They started contracting out essential but non-combat related jobs. When I was in the Marines, I remember about ten years ago our dining facilities (chow halls) were run by Marine cooks, and augmented by Marines on temporary assignment. Remember the cartoon antics of Beetle Bailey peeling potatoes? But then we transitioned to civilian-operated dining halls. A civilian company was contracted to run the Marine Corps dining halls which freed more numbers of Marines for combat specialties. That worked so well that the services began looking at other areas in which civilian contractors could help. Using civilian contractors was also cost-efficient. Now companies like Halliburton-KBR build, operate, and maintain roads, buildings, dining facilities, etc., all over the world on military contracts. Companies like ITT run military communications. Companies like MPRI are training, augmenting, and recruiting military forces.

MPRI is here, in part, to support CSTC-A (Combined Security Transition Command – Afghanistan).

CSTC-A works with the government of Afghanistan and the international community to reconstruct the Afghan security and defense sectors. CSTC-A is reconstructing the Afghan National Army, and the Afghan defense sector by recruiting soldiers, training Afghan recruiters, organizing the Ministry of Defense and mentoring its senior leaders and the General Staff, acquiring weapons, uniforms and equipment, as well as developing the policies and processes needed by a modern army to establish viable acquisition, personnel and other systems required to establish a working military infrastructure.

Afghanistan has been at war for decades. As a result, their military was decimated. CSTC-A is here to help rebuild it. I work for the Logistics Branch of MPRI. One of the things we're doing is establishing the ANA (Afghan National Army) supply system and training their soldiers to run it. CoreIMS is a tool we're using to automate inventory management and control. My job, specifically, is to develop a Program of Instruction (POI) to train ANA soldiers to use a Supply/Inventory software program called CoreIMS. One of the challenges, of course, is that the lesson plans, training materials, exams, etc., must be translated into Dari, the Afghan language. I have two ITs (Interpreter-Translators) who work for me--Aimal and Abdullah. I am qualified to do this because of my prior fifteen years experience in the Marine Corps as a logistics officer and training analyst/curriculum developer.