# US training foreign soldiers **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 21, 2014, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059 "2014-09-21T03:12:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2014, 7:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/61 "2014-09-26T19:09:17Z")
Perhaps because the Pakistani military keeps overthrowing their government? ---
**Author:** ![MichaelEmouse](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/michaelemouse/32/101_2.png) [@MichaelEmouse](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MichaelEmouse)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2014, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/62 "2014-09-26T19:23:10Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Across the border the British and later Pakistan did infact successfully build up regimental loyalties with the exact same ethnic groups like the Pashtuns as you have in Afghanistan. So it’s not like the concept is not implementable in that culture. Why the US never saw fit to build up regiments in the ANA? You would know better, Probably a big part of it is that the US doesn’t use the regimental system much. The US has certainly had major troubles relating to ethnic tensions but there was never a serious fear that, say, blacks would consider themselves a nation and wage an uprising to carve out country out of US territory. Unlike the Scots, Welsh, Irish for the UK and I believe that’s a big impetus behind the UK regimental system. Bear, How are Iraqis/Afghans trained to create some esprit de corps/camaraderie/cohesion among the personnel? How were your trainees in terms of shining their boots, doing drill and bootcamp-y stuff like that? ---
**Author:** ![Bear\_Nenno](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bear_nenno/32/3358_2.png) [@Bear\_Nenno](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bear_Nenno)\ **Post date:** [September 26, 2014, 10:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/63 "2014-09-26T22:34:04Z")
> [@MichaelEmouse](#): > > Bear, > How are Iraqis/Afghans trained to create some esprit de corps/camaraderie/cohesion among the personnel? > > How were your trainees in terms of shining their boots, doing drill and bootcamp-y stuff like that? To be clear, I was never assigned a primary job as Iraqi/Afghani recruit instructor. They were already “trained” soldiers by the time I got them, and had already completed whatever basic training was required. I was responsible for conducting joint patrols with their units and trained them (or attempted to) out of necessity. Occasionally, the commander would schedule time for specific tactical or marksmanship instruction and designate a platoon or squad to conduct the training for that day. The goal was to build camaraderie between our units and attempt to at least get them to a level of competency sufficient enough to not get us all killed. ---
**Author:** ![usedtobe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ec9cab/32.png) [@usedtobe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/usedtobe)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2014, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/64 "2014-09-27T01:30:55Z")
In Iraq, didn’t we “Mission Accomplished” by, among other brilliant moves, completely dis-band and dis-arm the existing Military? Including the guys who knew who to keep out, and how to keep them out? ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2014, 5:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/65 "2014-09-27T17:29:04Z")
> [@Bear\_Nenno](#): > > What was the penalty, if any, for quitting? If British Indians were not drafted and served merely for pay, could they quit at any time? Were there punishments for running away in battle? If they couldn’t quit, it behooves them to learn to fight. If they can quit whenever they want, then there isn’t much motivation to learn Some of them did run away, in 1942 and 1943. The Indian Army had been greatly expanded, experienced junior leaders were very scarce, company and field grade officers not having much experience of leading Indian troop and with poor language skills. My father recalled them tearing off their uniforms and running off to melt into the landscape (they forgot to take the dogtags off, so you could tell what they were). ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [September 27, 2014, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/66 "2014-09-27T19:57:00Z")
Some certainly ran away during the Indian Mutiny. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2014, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/67 "2014-09-28T16:29:33Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Eh, Peshmanga? The guys who broke records in the [running away from isis department?](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/12/islamic-state-peshmerga-vulnerability-kurdish-isis) Do you know what happened in the weeks that followed? The Kurds returned. And they’ve done a very fine job ever since. ---
**Author:** ![Loach](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/loach/32/350_2.png) [@Loach](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loach)\ **Post date:** [September 28, 2014, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/68 "2014-09-28T21:00:51Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > Eh, Peshmanga? The guys who broke records in the [running away from isis department?](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/12/islamic-state-peshmerga-vulnerability-kurdish-isis) > [@Steken](#): > > Do you know what happened in the weeks that followed? The Kurds returned. And they’ve done a very fine job ever since. Yes and there had been an underlying political problem. We armed them. But not too much. Because we placed all our eggs in the unified Iraq basket. So we couldn’t arm them enough to break away completely. And the Kurds feel that Kurdistan owns part of Turkey. So we couldn’t arm them enough to attack our NATO allies. So when iSIS came to town with captured heavy equipment they had nothing to fight them with. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/69 "2014-09-29T07:00:11Z")
> [@Loach](#): > > Yes and there had been an underlying political problem. We armed them. But not too much. Because we placed all our eggs in the unified Iraq basket. So we couldn’t arm them enough to break away completely. And the Kurds feel that Kurdistan owns part of Turkey. So we couldn’t arm them enough to attack our NATO allies. So when iSIS came to town with captured heavy equipment they had nothing to fight them with. Exactly right. The article I linked to in post #51 - [this one](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/fight-lives) - makes much the same point. > [@](#): > > As part of a nascent strategy for taking on ISIS, Obama has agreed to arm the peshmerga, who, despite their reputation, have been radically underequipped. Peshmerga commanders told me that, as they rolled into abandoned Iraqi Army bases, they were stunned by the weapons that the Americans had provided. “The Iraqi Army has the best equipment—M-16s, night-vision goggles, Humvees,” Fatih told me. Masrour Barzani, the Kurdish intelligence chief, said, “We never got any of that. We’ve got Kalashnikov rifles from the nineteen-seventies. The Americans never gave us anything, and they’ve blocked us from acquiring new weapons on our own.” Desperate for an advantage over ISIS, the Kurds have recently accepted weapons and military support from Iran. With both the U.S., Iran and Turkey supporting the (Iraqi) Kurds, it really does seem like their time has come. ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/70 "2014-09-29T07:32:18Z")
> [@seal\_cleaner](#): > > Now we are training forces in Syria, just as we did in Iraq, Vietnam, various other hot spots. > Seriously, what can we teach them that they don’t know? Is this just a sop to war hawks, or are there secrets they don’t yet know about combat? The real purpose is to hand out free big macs and coca colas in the mess hall so that when we leave and go back home they will have had exposure to our tasty american goods. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/71 "2014-09-29T12:53:48Z")
> [@AK84](#): > > The British had the regimental system. They used that. Men were expected to have the regiment and its soldiers as their primary loyalty. Units with long histories and battle honours. Units the men would be proud to join. It was often said that the men might fight for their King, but they would die for their regiment. That can’t be the primary reason the British Army functions as well as it does, though, because in general all Western armies fight well, and they don’t use the “regimental” system. Obligatory link and really important reading: > **[Why Arabs Lose Wars](https://www.meforum.org/middle-east-quarterly/why-arabs-lose-wars)** > > Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming ---
**Author:** ![Aspidistra](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aspidistra/32/3894_2.png) [@Aspidistra](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aspidistra)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 1:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/72 "2014-09-29T13:57:41Z")
If there’s one thing everyone seems to be agreed on in this thread, it’s that training troops in Iraq/Syria/wherever is a long slow grind, without much short-term effectiveness. There might be a longer-term effect though - that is, with US and other Western army personnel coming in and training troops week after month after year surely something will sink in eventually. My though at this point is - is that really a good idea? Given the instability of the region, there’s got to be a good chance that in five years time a bunch of the “friendlies” that are being trained now will be under the control of _unfriendly_ regimes - either because regions have fallen under the control of other groups, or because of regime change in formerly friendly states or because, well, politics. Has this already happened, in fact? When the army gets deployed to the Middle East, do they already find themselves fighting troops that have previously had American training? ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2014, 2:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/73 "2014-09-29T14:04:10Z")
Very interesting article, **RickJay** , thanks for sharing. As for the Iraqi Army, it is now [desperately trying to re-enlist its thousands upon thousands of deserters](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/world/middleeast/iraq-army-woos-deserters-back-to-war-on-isis.html). About a third have now returned to the Army; others have joined the Shi’ite militias; most, it seems, are unaccounted for. Lovely snippet from that article: > [@](#): > > While the [Shi’ite] militias have often worked alongside the army and have been critical to the fight, they are feared by many Sunnis, posing political problems for the government as it tries to persuade Sunnis to reject the Islamic State group. > > When asked how the military planned to reconstitute the fractured divisions in the face of such obvious obstacles, a brigadier general from the Defense Ministry in Baghdad who was observing the registration process in Qush Tapa this month mulled the question. > > After a few moments, he smiled and said, “I don’t know.” Also: Gen. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now claims that “of the 50 Iraqi brigades the United States military had assessed, 26 were deemed to be ‘reputable partners’. ‘They seem to have a certain cohesion and a commitment to the central government,’ General Dempsey said. The remainder, he said, had problems with ‘infiltration and leadership and sectarianism’.” OK then. At the same time, the country’s new-ish prime minister is now trying to change the army from within, [sacking old generals and dismantling the Maliki-era “office of the commander in chief.”](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/23/us-iraq-crisis-army-idUSKCN0HI1K320140923) More interestingly, perhaps, he is also pushing for the idea of “National Guards” made up of local militias, meant to defend their hometowns and little else. The move - which happens despite wild protests from Maliki - [has been called](http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/09/iraq-national-guard-sunni-militias.html#) “a compromise aimed at precluding a Sunni declaration of independent regions,” basically by letting the Sunnis police their own 'hoods - so the Shi’ites don’t have to. As the old song goes, “you gotta keep 'em separated.” Of course, > [@](#): > > There are – potentially well grounded – fears that the provincial units become too strong and start attacking other provinces, causing Iraq to disintegrate along sectarian lines even further. But hey, whaddyagonnado. ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2014, 12:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/74 "2014-09-30T00:44:23Z")
> [@Aspidistra](#): > > My though at this point is - is that really a good idea? Given the instability of the region, there’s got to be a good chance that in five years time a bunch of the “friendlies” that are being trained now will be under the control of _unfriendly_ regimes - either because regions have fallen under the control of other groups, or because of regime change in formerly friendly states or because, well, politics. > > Has this already happened, in fact? When the army gets deployed to the Middle East, do they already find themselves fighting troops that have previously had American training? These were my thoughts when I first saw this thread title. I mean, didn’t we already do that? Isn’t that what got us to this ridiculous point in the first place? I went to high school with an emigre from Tehran. She explained how the Ayatollah overthrew the Shah and her father sent her (and her sister and mother) to the USA to get them away from all that mayhem. When I asked how Iran got so much military hardware for such a tiny country, she told me “The US gave it to us. They gave us weapons and the CIA teachers came in and taught gorilla\* fighting techniques so we could keep the Russians from taking everything. The Russians want to claim it all for the oil fields.” And I sat in on an Rotary Club meeting in which someone had invited a history professor to come in and explain how we came to be waging wars in the Middle East. The essence of his lecture was to explain that we had pulled out of Viet Nam and soon turned our attention to the next area of Soviet Expansion: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the regions of far-eastern Europe and far-western Asia. And, rather than send in troops for another Police Action we sent supplies and teachers to let the locals push back harder against the Soviets. Then there was Glasnost, then the Wall fell, then Perestroika became a last gasp of The Enemy. And, with the loss of ‘that other’ superpower on the other side of the see-saw, the peoples of Northern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean started taking a hard look at the US and not liking what they saw. And the techniques they had learned – from CIA trainers – were turned against us. To mis-quote Douglas Adams, they sighed and said, “It’ll have to go.” and started a war to decimate everything about their former teacher/dealers that they didn’t like – which is everything. So now we’re doing it again? In order to help them defeat the people who have openly and loudly declared and demonstrated their hatred for the US, we’re training the locals who haven’t declared their hatred for the US (but it doesn’t quite seem like they’ve declared otherwise, either). I guess it was guaranteed that we’d repeat this. –G! - That’s how she pronounced it, and I was too young and naive to know she was talking about guerrilla warfare. It brought some weird images to mind… A Ferengi doesn’t learn history! There’s no profit in it! ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2014, 1:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059/75 "2014-11-07T01:51:32Z")
I thought I’d resurrect this zombie that I killed to link to this article that gives more detail about our previous “help” attempts in the Gulf region. > **[30 Years of Conservative Nonsense, An Explainer](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/11/conservative-nonsense-political-history)** > > If those calls to close the borders over Ebola are giving you déjà vu, you might not be wrong. Particularly Cases 3 and 4 (and you can ignore the rest because I’m not trying to push the author’s agenda by linking to those examples). [Quote: excerpt] American military at Fort Bragg trained Iraqi soldiers in guerrilla warfare, skills that were then taught by those troops to forces in Baghdad for decades. According to declassified documents and affidavits, the administration also sent arms and high-tech components to Saddam through third countries… [/quote] –G! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/us-training-foreign-soldiers/699059.md?page=3)