Perhaps because the Pakistani military keeps overthrowing their government?
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?
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.
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?
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).
Some certainly ran away during the Indian Mutiny.
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.
Exactly right. The article I linked to in post #51 - this one - makes much the same point.
With both the U.S., Iran and Turkey supporting the (Iraqi) Kurds, it really does seem like their time has come.
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.
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:
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?
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. 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:
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.” 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 “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,
But hey, whaddyagonnado.
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!
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.
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!