Why Is the American Military So Bad at Teaching Others How to Fight? By Fred Kaplan, Slate
… Military training is more complicated than many realize. True, the Taliban, al-Qaida, and ISIS don’t require advanced training for its recruits, so, it’s often asked, why should the Afghan or Iraqi army? But the two tasks are different. Insurgents can attack at a time and place of their choosing; if met with force, they can withdraw and attack someplace else. By contrast, armies defending the government have to be strong and ready everywhere, or they need to have the means to move quickly from one place to another.
So training is not just a matter of teaching soldiers how to shoot straight and maneuver on a battlefield (which American trainers do well). If the goal is to turn the fighting completely over to the local armed forces, then training must also involve teaching them how to conduct and call in air strikes, gather intelligence and apply it to tactical operations, move soldiers rapidly from one area to another (which involves flying helicopters or small transport planes), resupply soldiers when they’re deployed far from the base (logistics), and plan operations on a strategic or theater-wide level.
To do all these things goes well beyond the abilities of American infantry or special-operations forces assigned to a training mission. In other words, the way we currently train, it may never be possible to make our client-armies completely self-reliant…
Comments
I believe part of our issue with "security force assistance" may be our tendency to focus on throwing gobs of money at a problem thinking that this will solve it as well as focusing on our OWN needs (to include checking the appropriate blocks for a good end-of-tour eval) instead of the needs and skills of the host-nation force. This applies to both GPF and SOF. That's a bit simplistic, but it does reflect what I saw in Afg & Iraq.
The fundamental mistake that Kaplan and so many others make is to confuse war with warfare. We are very good at training people to conduct warfare, but that effort will ultimately fail if the people we are supporting cannot engage in "war."
Here I define war as the use of violence by coherent political communities to achieve political aims. The problem we face is that we support groups that are not capable of war by that definition. Any military force, if it wants to endure and succeed, must have the support of a coherent political community whose political interests it represents. Why does a military force fight? It fights for its people - the political community it represents and without that it cannot exist for long. Our problem is that we continually try to create military forces where: No political community exists (Syria); the political community is fractured and incoherent (Iraq), the political community is weak (Vietnam).
We are perfectly capable of training people how to fight from the tactical through operational levels of "warfare," but we are incapable of building a coherent political community that can sustain a military force absent our active presence.
The problem is we begin with an inaccurate view of the political landscape. In Iraq we believed a political community of moderates existed who would form an inclusive, multi-factional and mulit-sectarian Iraqi government. To facilitate that effort we thought we help could create a military force to defend it. But that political community only existed in our minds - thus the military force we created and trained did not represent a community - IOW, it had no one to fight for. So it dissolved and reorganized to reflect the political reality in Iraq.
The same thing happened in Syria, but the mistake was even greater. There is no coherent, moderate, opposition political community in Syria, so it is folly to believe we can train a military force that can defeat the rest of country and then magically install an inclusive government. The almost complete lack of an actual moderate opposition is what explains the embarrassing failure of our efforts in Syria - it is a failure that has nothing to do with our skill at tactical and operational training since it is a political failure.
So, we've been doing the process backward - armies cannot exist without political support. We wrongly believe that if "we build an army, they will come." We built an army and the people did not come. QED
If we want to succeed, we need build an army around an existing coherent political community - attempting to build a political community around an army is doomed to failure.
I know Mr. Kaplan is an acclaimed author and journalist and has written some well respected pieces on Iraq and Afghanistan but we have been writing about these issues for some time. I think it would a great project for someone to assess the work of Small Wars Journal to see how the debate on Small Wars, Irregular Warfare, Counterinsurgency and the new fangled terms from post-9-11 such as Security Force Assistance, Building Partner Capacity and all the others that people came to believe would be silver bullets in Iraq and Afghanistan have evolved over time. The truth is that training foreign forces (especially to try to get them to fight for our interests rather than working to ensure we can have adequate alignment of interests) can never be the main part of any strategy. It can only be an adjunct to a more complete strategy. Below are a select few of the articles that I wrote for Small Wars Journal trying to address the very issues that Mr. Kaplan is still trying to address today. Small Wars Journal remains the best collaborative web site for discussions of these issues that exists on the web.
And I still disagree with John Nagl that we need a 20,000 man advisory corps. We need to use the right forces to conduct the right missions and ensure those missions properly support an effective strategy that does not rely totally or near totally on the success of forces that are not actually able to be controlled by the US.
Considerations for Organizing and Preparing for Security Force Assistance Operations (2008)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/security-force-assistance-operatio…
Considerations for Organizing for Future Advisory Missions (2008)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/considerations-for-organizing-for-futu…
Random Thoughts on Irregular Warfare and Security Assistance (2008)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/random-thoughts-on-irregular-warfa…
"A Few Random Thoughts on COIN Theory and the Future" (or A Partial Response to theSmall Wars Journal Weekend Homework Assignment!!!) (2009)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/a-few-random-thoughts-on-coin-theory-a…
Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) (2013)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/assessing-revolutionary-and-insurgent-…
The Only Thing Worse than Misusing SOF is Policy Makers Misusing SOF Operational Methods as a Strategy (2015)
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/the-only-thing-worse-than-misusing…
This is not a training problem (though our training of others has much to be desired far too often). This is about our insistence on framing political solutions for others designed to be what we think is best from our perspective, and that therefore are fatally lacking in popular legitimacy across broad segments of the affected population.
This inherent lack of popular legitimacy was the death blow to US strategy in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
If we could re-find the wisdom and courage to allow others to self-determine governance they think best for themselves, and then offer our support to whatever happens to emerge, we could avoid this fate. But we are so far unwilling to assume that risk, so the trend continues.
We also are too quick to attempt to make people into a lesser version of ourselves, rather than simply helping them to be the best version of who they actually are. This is as true for the governance we help them to create as it is for the security forces we attempt to build to make it all work.