Abu Muqawama: Post
Abu Muqawama retains its autonomy and the views and beliefs expressed within the blog do not reflect those of CNAS. Abu Muqawama retains the right to delete comments that include words that incite violence; are predatory, hateful, or intended to intimidate or harass; or degrade people on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability. In summary, don't be a jerk.
Flunking the Advisor Training Mission
June 12, 2008 | Posted by Kip - 11:33am | 19 Comments
This is the last of a four-part series on the Army's advisor training efforts.
Are you deaf? Limp? Ancient (mostly our National Guard brethren)?
After climbing a flight of stairs, do you most resemble a hyperventilating pumpkin?
Can't fire your weapon? Can't learn a language? Think that Blue Force Tracker is a Ticketmaster promotion for the Blue Man Group?
Fired from your last company command for drunk driving?
Believe that preaching Christ to your Muslim counterparts is the surest way to salvation?
Great, because the US Army has a job for you that you literally can't fail--training at the Fort Riley Training Mission to be an advisor.
You can fail Airborne school. You can fail Ranger school. You can fail Sapper school. But the Army's number one mission--our efforts to develop security forces capable of providing security and stability to the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan--no matter what you do, no matter how terrible you are going to be as an advisor, you simply can't fail the training.
And herein lies the problem. Our doctrine on advising (in as much as we have one; our Special Operations manual on Foreign Internal Defense is the closest thing), describes a list of traits that advisors must possess in order to succeed. These are encapsulated in the ability to develop rapport with a foreign counterpart, demonstrate the credibility of your military advice, and provide value through access to United States and Coalition effects. Moreover, advisors must be capable of operating and surviving in small man teams, isolated from their Big Army brethren.
Like leadership, the traits of capable advisors are at times ingrained but also trainable.
The Joint Center for Security Force Assistance (JCISFA) has exercised itself to understand what makes good conventional force advisors. Yet there is little incorporation of their findings into either the training or selection of advisors.
It does not take a strategician of Petraeusean proportions to realize the bankruptcy of training advisors for such an important mission with no way to select and recognize the capable while preventing the incapable and untrainable from doing harm to our efforts.
Whether it is by selecting advisors through boards ahead of commanders and other slots or placing the selection and elimination criteria within the training itself or developing an advisor command is beyond the scope of this post. But until the Army can shut the spigot on mediocrity by developing quality controls for its advisor selection and training, the most difficult obstacle for the large number of good advisors may be the taint on their reputations resulting from the currently unflunkable bad.
For the first three posts in this series, click here, here, and here. For Tom Odom's ill-informed tripe on Kip being ill-informed, click here.
(Generally I find Tom Odom's comments on the SWJ blog illuminating but then again Mr. Odom is not usually criticizing me by citing not Kip's words but the words of some anonymous reader. I wonder who is ill-informed. I would ask Mr. Odom where the quarter billion dollars is for this mass movement of personnel and mission to Fort Polk. Polk doesn't even have housing for a handful of trainers right now to kick start the mission there let alone having broken ground on housing for 1000 trainers and 2000 students at any given time. And, as another member of the Council pointed out, my point had nothing to do with the nature of training at Fort Polk in general or mission overlap--which Kip thinks is a rather uninformed argument for a CTC focused on unit training exercises rather than advisor unit development and individual skills training--but the wisdom of moving the mission in the midst of an ever-larger need for advisors to a location that few former advisors will be willing to move their families. Rant over, and I'll go back to learning from LTC Odom again.)
Are you deaf? Limp? Ancient (mostly our National Guard brethren)?
After climbing a flight of stairs, do you most resemble a hyperventilating pumpkin?
Can't fire your weapon? Can't learn a language? Think that Blue Force Tracker is a Ticketmaster promotion for the Blue Man Group?
Fired from your last company command for drunk driving?
Believe that preaching Christ to your Muslim counterparts is the surest way to salvation?
Great, because the US Army has a job for you that you literally can't fail--training at the Fort Riley Training Mission to be an advisor.
You can fail Airborne school. You can fail Ranger school. You can fail Sapper school. But the Army's number one mission--our efforts to develop security forces capable of providing security and stability to the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan--no matter what you do, no matter how terrible you are going to be as an advisor, you simply can't fail the training.
And herein lies the problem. Our doctrine on advising (in as much as we have one; our Special Operations manual on Foreign Internal Defense is the closest thing), describes a list of traits that advisors must possess in order to succeed. These are encapsulated in the ability to develop rapport with a foreign counterpart, demonstrate the credibility of your military advice, and provide value through access to United States and Coalition effects. Moreover, advisors must be capable of operating and surviving in small man teams, isolated from their Big Army brethren.
Like leadership, the traits of capable advisors are at times ingrained but also trainable.
The Joint Center for Security Force Assistance (JCISFA) has exercised itself to understand what makes good conventional force advisors. Yet there is little incorporation of their findings into either the training or selection of advisors.
It does not take a strategician of Petraeusean proportions to realize the bankruptcy of training advisors for such an important mission with no way to select and recognize the capable while preventing the incapable and untrainable from doing harm to our efforts.
Whether it is by selecting advisors through boards ahead of commanders and other slots or placing the selection and elimination criteria within the training itself or developing an advisor command is beyond the scope of this post. But until the Army can shut the spigot on mediocrity by developing quality controls for its advisor selection and training, the most difficult obstacle for the large number of good advisors may be the taint on their reputations resulting from the currently unflunkable bad.
For the first three posts in this series, click here, here, and here. For Tom Odom's ill-informed tripe on Kip being ill-informed, click here.
(Generally I find Tom Odom's comments on the SWJ blog illuminating but then again Mr. Odom is not usually criticizing me by citing not Kip's words but the words of some anonymous reader. I wonder who is ill-informed. I would ask Mr. Odom where the quarter billion dollars is for this mass movement of personnel and mission to Fort Polk. Polk doesn't even have housing for a handful of trainers right now to kick start the mission there let alone having broken ground on housing for 1000 trainers and 2000 students at any given time. And, as another member of the Council pointed out, my point had nothing to do with the nature of training at Fort Polk in general or mission overlap--which Kip thinks is a rather uninformed argument for a CTC focused on unit training exercises rather than advisor unit development and individual skills training--but the wisdom of moving the mission in the midst of an ever-larger need for advisors to a location that few former advisors will be willing to move their families. Rant over, and I'll go back to learning from LTC Odom again.)
Add your comment