Center for a New American Security

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.)

This is the third in a four part series on training advisors.

Six years into the Long War, efforts to train advisors remain mediocre. But they are improving. Fort Riley Training Mission commander Colonel Jeff Ingram deserves special plaudits for taking a thankless mission after having the combat forces gutted from his brigade and attempting to foster effective, survivable combat advisor teams.

As an advisor-in-training in October 2006, the training we received was the worst I had received in the Army to date. The training schedule seemed to be an hour ahead of our current location, and often an hour behind. The idea that operating in Afghanistan might be different than Iraq had perhaps crossed the trainers' minds, but the solutions was simply to train as though we would go to Iraq and finish by saying, "Well, this should help for Afghanistan as well." If I had ten dollars for every time an instructor said, "So, where are you guys headed in Iraq? Oh, you're going to Afghanistan. Well, its about the same thing," I could have foregone combat pay.

By the end of training, some enterprising students had begun publishing an underground weekly The Funston Insurgent (Camp Funston is where advisor training takes place at Fort Riley).

The conditions today are significantly improved. Advisors begin their training with a week-long session on advising host nation security forces in a counterinsurgency. They engage in practical leader meetings to evaluate their ability to influence Iraqis and Afghans. They conduct realistic combat training to prepare them to act as teams. Much of the training is tailored to the specific theater of operations where they will deploy.

Key shortcomings remain. Unlike most other schools in the Army, there remains no way to fail advisor training (the subject of the final post in this series). And unlike just about any other military training, few of the instructors have ever been practitioners. With fewer than 5% of the current trainers having been advisors in the past, the training is the equivalent of running Airborne school with 95% of the instructors never having jumped out of a plane (aka dirty, nasty "legs")

That said, the efforts at Fort Riley represent major progress in the training of advisors even as significant problems remain with advisor selection and employment in the Long War. The Fort Riley Training Mission still requires tremendous work but all trends in its training are moving in the right direction. And what has the Army now decided to do? Move the mission to Fort Polk. At the same time, the Army has not committed any real resources toward the establishment of a training center at Polk.

Fort Polk, Louisiana is the post where the divorce lawyers begin as civilization ends. It has been difficult to get former advisors to commit to moving their families to Fort Riley, Kansas after serving a hardship tour. Quality contractors with expertise in Iraq and Afghanistan are equally difficult to hire to come to Fort Riley, Kansas, despite the presence of Kansas State University just a few miles away. It will become next to impossible in a Louisiana swamp.

Mediocre but steadily improving advisor training will atrophy back to terrible, and we will see the emergence of the next incarnation of The Funston Insurgent, The Polk Guerrilla.

The advisor needs of Afghanistan and Iraq are going to increase regardless of who wins the upcoming election. Derailing the Fort Riley train just as it has become operational is a stupid turning back of the clock, especially without any real plan to resource a training mission at Fort Polk and real thought as to the quality of folks that will be attracted to serving there.

Fort Riley was a terrible place to establish an advisor training center. But it is the best thing we have going now. With far fewer resources than are required to move the thing to Polk, the right answer is to improve on the training mission's current status as a trailer park in tornado land. Establishing the ability to conduct field training exercises in locations resembling the terrain of Afghanistan or Iraq as the Marines do with their transition teams out of Twenty-Nine Palms would also allow better training without uprooting the entire mission.

The advisor training mission has been conducted at any number of revolving locations from Fort Shelby to Carson to Riley. It has finally settled down, and it is time to see the return on the investment rather than cash out to buy junk bonds.

(For the first two posts in this series, click here and here)

This is the second in a four part series on training combat advisors:

Perhaps the greatest challenge that faces our advisory efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq is not the negligence of our efforts to man, equip, and train transition teams effectively but rather the institutional failure to train our brigade and battalion commanders on the mission, capabilities, and employment of these teams.

In both theaters, conventional brigade and battalion commanders (including non-US ISAF commanders in Afghanistan) control "battlespace." This means that they are essentially lord of Coalition forces in their areas and, hence, lord of the combat advisors therein.

Unlike combat advisors who are told by doctrine to eat, sleep, and live with their counterparts, Coalition maneuver forces, even those co-located with local forces, generally live physically separated from both the locals and their advisors. Most of the time, advisors in the Coalition commander's area of operations will not know the commander personally, will not have met prior to deployment, and will not have their deployment time lines synched, i.e., the maneuver commander may have changes in his advisor teams during his watch, and the advisor teams may serve under different maneuver commanders.

Relationships between advisor teams and their maneuver commanders are fraught with friction. At no point, other than a few-hour briefing at the Counterinsurgency Center for Excellence in Taji for Iraq-bound commanders (Afghanistan-bound commanders do not attend the equivalent institution in Afghanistan) does the US Army provide commanders with the understanding of their advisors needed to successfully direct them.

Without advisor doctrine, it would be difficult to develop a training program for commanders on employing their advisors. Yet such a program is urgently needed. Here are just a few of the precepts it would teach:

1. Your advisors are exactly that, advisors. They do not control Iraqi or Afghan forces. You cannot make a plan that includes local security forces without involving the local commander in the planning, hand it to your advisor team, and suddenly expect the local forces to show up in support of your mission.

2. Your concern is the day-to-day operations of your unit. You know your Army or Marine Corps is going to function tomorrow. The best advisors are concerned not only with completing combat missions but also in building the institutional army or police capable of defeating the insurgency. Success in the latter is our exit strategy. Occasionally success in the latter will mean failing in the former--or at least not succeeding on your time line. Remember, this is a long-term effort.

3. Because developing host nation forces capable of separating the insurgency from the people is the only way that your grandchildren will not be serving in these theaters, you must design your operations and the employment of your forces to support the local security forces, not the other way around. At the end of the day it matters far less how effective your unit is at waging counterinsurgency than how effective the host nation security forces are at waging counterinsurgency (although the former is very important to fill the gaps and protect the populace).

4. Circulate with and engage with your combat advisors. They should not be the if-time-available stop after you have visited your platoons, companies, and battalions. If they are an afterthought, you are not engaging with the most important effort in the fight.

5. Train your subordinates, all the way down to private, on the role of the combat advisor. Identify those with a special knack for training, cultural competence, language, and other areas. When you are forced to internally source security forces or advisor teams, you will be prepared. If it is not painful to assign these personnel, i.e., it doesn't hurt your ability to operate as a unit, you are not assigning the right people.

6. Advisors have more access to human intelligence on a daily basis than any tactical human intelligence team in theater. What is your plan for collecting and analyzing this intelligence?

7. Have you thought about how you are going to battle track your advisors? How about logistics and intelligence support? Advisor teams have access only to what you provide them--determine how well you want the winning team to be resourced.

8. Advisors have many daddies, and you are just one, most important for their survival but probably not most important to their function as advisors. They, at a minimum, have their advisor chain of command and also have significant responsibility to the unit they are advising (and in Afghanistan, they have even more daddies). This makes advisors walk a fine line. Yes, you may not have ordered 1st Company to go anywhere, but the Ministry of Defense did, and the advisors had to make a decision about whether to do their job or not. If they stayed with the company, that essentially means that they chose to follow a Ministry of Defense order. It's a tough nut, and you need to empower them with sufficient guidance to anticipate the 15 minute "inshallah" (God-willing) order.

9. Advisors may advise a battalion, but they are not a battalion staff. They don't even have the resources of a platoon, so ensure you know what you are asking from them in terms of time and human resources for reporting, and understand who else is asking for reports. Many advisors have told me that 25% or more of their time was taken up with often redundant reporting requirements (and such was the case during my time as an advisor), severely undermining their ability to support the local unit.

10. It's actually not your battle space. It's the local commander's. When you begin to treat the area of operations that way, we are getting closer to winning.

This is not by any means a comprehensive list. Kip encourages current and former advisors to write in the comments on some of the lessons that they think commanders ought receive on the advisor mission. Commanders and non-advisors are welcome to write on their challenges in employing advisors (e.g., You all weren't exactly selected for being the cream of the crop, and you want to be taken seriously...)

That we haven't begun training commanders on the employment and resourcing of advisors is no surprise given that we have only just begun in the last year to somewhat seriously train some advisors. Our failure to train commanders has been a tremendous oversight on the part of both the US Army and Marine Corps. For Afghanistan, NATO will need to train not only OMLTs (Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams, e.g., NATO-sourced advisor teams) but also the Coalition commanders who will oversee them.

No brigade or regiment should deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq without significant training on sourcing and supporting combat advisors. The outcome of the Long War will rest on their commanders' abilities to support the development of local forces.

(To see the first post in this series, click here. To see a previous post on why the solution to this problem is not to simply turn brigades into advisor units, click here. If you want to know how cynical advisors become after doing the job for a while (and a good laugh), see Charlie's post here)

It has become increasingly common knowledge that we only pay lip service to the advisor mission as the most important mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have not trained, equipped, or employed advisors in order to allow them to be decisive in both theaters--nor have we task organized the Army in particular or established its personnel management system to support long term advisory efforts. We will have these requirements for some time to come in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Give any officer or senior NCO today who would like to advance his career a choice about whether he would take a standard command or staff position or an advisor position and he would almost surely choose the former (some of us who have advised might choose the latter but we wouldn't believe it would enhance our careers). Several of my next few posts will deal with some less well-known specifics about the advisor mission that will need to be fixed if senior leaders believe, as I believe and they have said they believe, that only the Afghans and Iraqis can, at the end of the day, defeat Takfiris and other anti-government elements within.

The question of who trains US military advisors should seem on its face a simple one. For those who read this blog, serve in the US Army, or have read about the advisor mission elsewhere, the answer would seem the Fort Riley Training Mission in Kansas (subject of a Wall Street Journal piece in February, an article on NPR, and various other news stories). Indeed, Fort Riley was stood up to address the ad hoc training of advisors deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq that existed prior to 2006.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, perhaps if you've ever been stationed at Riley), the reality remains that many who serve as mentors to the Iraqi and Afghan Army and Police forces come from an utterly confusing array of different training posts with no standardized training nor a standardized conception of what it is that advisors do.

For Iraq, US Army advisors for the Iraqi Army and Iraqi National Police are often trained at Fort Riley. Advisors for the Iraqi Police (the local, as opposed to national force), however, are trained at Fort Leonard Wood with little or no cross talk between the two institutions. Advisors serving at higher levels within the Iraqi Assistance Group are trained at any mish mash of places as more-or-less individual augmentees.

For Afghanistan, US Army, Navy, and Air Force advisors theoretically train at Fort Riley. Unfortunately, since the command in Afghanistan does not identify in what capacity personnel will serve prior to their arrival in theater, many personnel who will be serving in mentor regional commands or TF Phoenix staff with no advisory function are sent to the training to gain tactical skills and advisor instruction totally irrelevant to their job (e.g., the computer network guy for Camp Phoenix in Kabul). Also, many who serve on advisor teams or in leadership positions receive their training not at Fort Riley but instead at Fort Shelby. This includes the current command at TF Phoenix and many of its senior mentors who, despite rebuffed attempts by the current commander to have the 27th trained at Fort Riley, were trained at Shelby.

Others serving in the advisor mission, for example security force personnel accompanying many of the advisor teams and therefore capable of being asked to serve as advisors while on missions, receive their training at Fort Bragg or any number of Reserve mobilization stations. Individual augmentees for Afghanistan can be trained at Fort Dix (about two weeks), Fort Benning (a few days), or any number of other sites.

US Marines, executing the same mission as Army, Navy, and Air Force advisors in both Iraq and Afghanistan are trained separately at Twenty-Nine Palms. Separately trained Marine teams often serve side by side with their sister-service brethren advisors.

Internally sourced training teams coming from Army and Marine Corps regular combat units receive no specific advisor training.

Meanwhile, the PRTs, who serve, when acting most effectively, as advisors to the Iraqi and Afghan governments on governance and economic development train at Fort Bragg entirely separate from those who will be mentoring the Iraqi and Afghan security forces, inhibiting unity of effort.

There is absolutely no cross over between advisor training efforts of components of Special Operations Command, primarily, MARSOC and USASOC and those of the regular forces, even as Special Operations units are working closely with conventionally-sourced advisors on the ground.

And we won't even get too deep into the training of non-US-NATO-sourced Operational Mentor and Liaison Teams which train in their home countries and then may or may not go to US-run JMRC in Germany for additional training.

What does this all add up to? A big mess. JCISFA (the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance) based at Fort Leavenworth was an attempt to fix this, but it lacks any real teeth or control over even the Fort Riley Training Mission, located only a couple hours away in Kansas, let alone, the other advisor training efforts. And even JCISFA does not know all of the training centers that are involved in training advisors today.

Advisors on the ground don't have a common training regimen, let alone doctrine, to fall back on (although JCISFA is trying to fix the latter). Advisor commands, resourced by personnel who generally have never served as advisors and have received little advisor training, have little understanding of the training and capabilities of the teams which serve under them. Advisors with similar missions or working in the same area of operations deploy ad hoc to that area, even if they deploy as individual teams, inhibiting unity of effort at the ground level.

Fixing the situation will require first recognition that the advisor mission is not going to go away and then a push by senior leaders, including Congress, to codify advisor missions and training and to develop long-term, sustainable solutions that train and deploy Joint advisor teams capable of providing support across all counterinsurgency lines of effort. It remains a large question mark whether the leaders within these institutions can overcome bureaucratic inertia and their own prejudices (particularly SOCOM's allergies to supporting the training of conventional advisors) to enact such solutions. Their ability to prevail over the current system may be a large determining factor in just how long we have to fight and bleed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other theaters.