Advice for Obama on military advisors

Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Monday, January 26, 2009 - 7:50 PM Share

A couple of years ago, Barack Obama ran into the journalist James Fallows and began quizzing him about the U.S. military in Iraq. Among his questions, reports Charles Peters in the new issue of the Washington Monthly, was: "Does the incentive system in the U.S. Army offer sufficient reward for success in training Iraqi troops?"

It's a good question.

The answer is no, last time I looked. But that was awhile ago, so I asked my colleague at small-but-smart CNAS, retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl, who commanded a battalion that trained advisors for Iraq, and knows more about this than I ever will. He responded:

Last year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates correctly told future Army officers at West Point that "[F]rom the standpoint of America's national security, the most important assignment in your military career may not necessarily be commanding U.S. soldiers, but advising or mentoring the troops of other nationals as they battle the forces of terror and the instability within their own borders.
Unfortunately, although the Army has in general displayed impressive adaptation to the demands of counterinsurgency, especially in Iraq over the past two years, this is an area in which there is still much room for improvement. We are still not selecting all of our advisors for their expertise, tracking those who have this experience, or properly rewarding them for their service in both the most demanding and most important counterinsurgency mission we're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is still no advisor incentive pay or distinctive 'Combat Advisor' badge or insignia; we provide both to Airborne-qualified personnel, although it's hard to argue that that skill is more important today than the ability to teach our friends and allies to fight insurgents so we don't have to (and I say this as someone who wore my Airborne wings with pride for more than twenty years).
Secretary Gates pushed the Department of Defense to do better in September at the National Defense University, noting that, 'One of the enduring issues our military struggles with is whether personnel and promotions systems designed to reward command of American troops will be able to reflect the importance of advising, training, and equipping foreign troops -- which is still not considered a career-enhancing path for our best and brightest officers. Or whether formations and units organized, trained, and equipped to destroy enemies can be adapted well enough, and fast enough, to dissuade or co-opt them -- or, more significantly, to build the capacity of local security forces to do the dissuading and destroying.' In my eyes, although we're getting better -- and General Dempsey, in charge of the Army's new Training and Doctrine Command, recently put out a rush order for doctrine on the Security Forces Assistance mission -- we still have a lot of room for improvement."

Lorie Jewell/U.S. Army via Getty Images

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WALKING WOUNDED

11:50 PM ET

January 26, 2009

... training Iraqi troops, to do what?

Thx for some nice exposition on this topic. Hope it draws some experienced commentary.

SF (Green Beret A teams) arguably are rewarded for a career specialty in training/laison. Using the SF in hunter-killer roles was just one of the things that got us to 2006 in such fine shape. Right guys, wrong mission.

The 2004-5 'standup' mission achieved conditional success. We armed a large Shia force, with Cheney publicly anticipating 'insurgent' collapse that year. The Baghdad Sunni insurgency couldn't hold it's turf in 2006, and Team Casey was tracking toward a modified roman solution in Anbar. Sunni fighters would have been destroyed in detail in the Baghdad belt in 2007, if the surge hadn't stopped Shia forces in place, rebranding surviving insurgents as Sawa/awakening, protecting and augmenting them with recruits from a Sawa pacified Anbar.

I just read TE Lawrence's brilliant 'Evolution of a Revolt' paper. His superiors envisioned years of training up an Arab Legion that would go head to head with Turkish divisions. Lawrence' genius was not so much in training Bedouin tribesmen, as in recognizing that his mission was not to kill Turks, or even to fully destroy their rail communication. He describes his aha! as enabling his weak/popular force to annoy the Turks into a harmless defensive posture. The more harmless garrison mouths to feed, the better. Strength in weakness, weakness in strength.

Key to this was careful psychological cultivation of the people, which is not to be confused with a media campaign. Lawrence thinks his revolt could have won, without Allenby's expensive mainforce victory in Palestine. But would an Arab victory have been acceptable to the Anglo-French?

http://telawrence.net/telawrencenet/works/articles_essays/1920_evolution_of_a_revolt.htm

TE's take-home lesson is to carefully define our mission so that we a) motivate our levies via their own values, to b) succeed very economically. We're not very good at A or B. Our local allies want to win the war, not fight pitched battles. TE drove the Turk into uneconomic dispositions, to bankrupt him. An unfavorable kill/cost ratio was one of Rumsfeld's nightmares, as with MacNamara before him. Like the Turk they didn't know the ground.

TE doesn't tell us how to deal with suicide warriors. His side was the soup- planting mines, not the knife- probing for them in the dirt. Sometimes we're stuck with the war we're given, not the war we want.

If Zarqawi read Lawrence, he knew that the weak force never presents a target, to allow the enemy to 'attack into the threat'. Zarqawi didn't train his recruits, so much as use them for what they were suited. Same for the Taliban's Pashtun, tribes who are born to insurgency, but not to COIN.

Wahabi infiltrators paid cash for the priviledge of fighting against a US force much stronger than the 1917 Turks. In some cases, they wanted to die, and that made good propaganda for more jihadis. Calling artillery on a Taliban platoon in a pashtun village might not be good propaganda.

The heart of our difficulty may not be a trainer-compensation problem. Dying for democracy is not a good recruiting pitch for the Kabul or Baghdad police force that serves a kleptocracy. We won't be able to pay enough,buy levies that will out-sacrifice Taliban muj. We can't train them to shoot deserters, like in Saddam's army. As with the record for low-altitude flying, the oppositon sets a standard in some things that can only be tied, at best.

The "mission objective" problem comes before that of rewarding trainers less than combat NCOs and officers.