In the last five years, ANSF members have killed more than 75 ISAF military advisers. In 2012, 1 out of every 4 ISAF casualties has been at the hands of a member of the ANSF. These deaths present a huge problem to the U.S. exit strategy, which is based on the expectation that the ANSF will be able to provide enough security for Afghanistan that will prevent the reemergence of the Taliban or use Al Qaeda’s unimpeded use of Afghan territory to plan attacks.
But only a very small percentage of Afghan National Army battalions are capable of conducting combat operations on their own, which means ISAF military advisers will be in Afghanistan for a long time. The need for trust is crucial – and may be gone for good. We can expect these advisers to be dispersed throughout the country on small combat outposts without major American support nearby. How will they simultaneously protect themselves from militants and the Afghans they are advising? How will policymakers ask troops to advise an army that might kill them at a moment’s notice?
Being an adviser can be an incredibly frustrating experience.* Regular military units typically don’t trust you because of your close association with local forces; meanwhile, advisers often see regular units as working at cross-purposes to the advisory mission. Advising local forces can be like herding cats; it requires patience, understanding, and tact—three traits not typically emphasized in American military training. An adviser must spend hours and hours each day with the men he is advising - even when he’s not advising or assisting with an issue at hand, he’s hanging out, building a relationship. While everyone else is at salsa night or playing Xbox, the adviser is having chai with his counterpart. Actually, a proper campaign plan doesn’t even give the adviser an option to attend salsa night on the FOB - he’s out on an indigenous base living with his counterparts.
Moreover, an adviser must enter his deployment knowing that he will not likely succeed. At the very least, he has to revise his standards for success. My team leader, who served on three different adviser teams, put it like this: “Advising is like pushing a huge boulder up a steep hill. You’re not going to push the boulder to the top; you just have to prevent it from rolling to the bottom.” Making lasting changes to another country’s military cannot be accomplished in a standard 7 or 12-month deployment; the best you can hope for is not to lose ground and hand the unit off to the next adviser team in as good a state as you found it.
An example: the Iraqi Army, which is generations more advanced than the Afghan army, has developed an organizational culture derived from Russian military doctrine and the personality of Saddam Hussein. In American military doctrine, the S-2 intelligence officer is always in communication with the S-3 operations officer. Intelligence drives operations. Operations result in new intelligence, which begins the cycle anew. The Iraqi Army, however, does not subscribe to this doctrine. The S-2 and S-3 officers often do not communicate at all. The S-2 officer runs his own operations based on his own intelligence. The S-3 officer has his own sources through family or tribal connections. S-2 officers are often more concerned with the insider threat. Altering a culture of separation that ingrained is challenging; advisers may have success at the individual unit level, but they’re not going to change those kinds of behaviors across the entire organization in 9 months. It would take an entire generation or longer. The adviser must learn to work within the organizational culture of the military he is advising, not necessarily try and force the advisees to conform to American military doctrine. And this is independent of the need for cultural understanding, which, suffice it to say, requires another dose of patience, understanding, and tact.
Traditionally, advising has been almost exclusively the purview of the Army’s Special Forces, the vaunted Green Berets. Historically, regular Army and Marine units do not train for this mission. That’s not to say that conventional forces haven’t done it, it’s just not something that the service chiefs like to do as it impedes on their traditional missions and budgets. Once policymakers recognized that the only way we were going to leave Iraq with any semblance of stability was by [training Iraqi soldiers to be good at their jobs], the advisory mission took on new importance. But the scope of the task was so big that Green Berets alone could not do the job, and the Army and the Marine Corps began organizing and training Military Transition Teams (MiTT).
The Marine Corps fashioned its MiTTs out of individual augments, which meant that a team was composed of Marines pulled from their regular units across a range of military occupational specialties. Officers and staff non-commissioned officers (SNCOs) would typically pair up with Iraqis who worked in the appropriate staff section, e.g. an infantry officer would work with the Iraqi S-3 to advise him on planning and conducting operations while an intelligence officer would pair up with the Iraqi S-2 to advise and assist him on intelligence matters. The MiTT team leader would advise the Iraqi battalion commander. This was repeated for the other staff sections as well — logistics, training, administration, etc. Marine MiTTs also had junior Marines to serve as drivers and gunners on MiTT tactical movements, but the Marines also used them as advisers to great effect. My team used their expertise to teach classes on weapons, tactics, maintenance, and communications to enlisted Iraqi soldiers.
My MiTT spent three full months working up together. Our training package emphasized language, culture, and negotiating. We also spent the requisite amount of time patrolling, running convoys, and practicing other team and individual military skills. We spent 3 weeks in Twentynine Palms for a final exercise that included native Iraqis as role players in a full, mock up Iraqi village. There were hundreds of us out there and many of the scenarios in the exercise repeated themselves in Iraq. It was intense.
And it wasn’t nearly enough. I could have used more training. A lot more. We all could.
As a part of our campaign plan in Afghanistan, the US is going to begin transitioning out of the lead for combat operations, just as we did in Iraq. As combat units rotate home, they will be replaced by what the Army is calling Security Force Assistance Teams (SFATs). The good news is that these SFATs will be composed primarily of officers and senior SNCOs pulled from the same brigade staff – they will not be individual augments pulled from disparate units – so there will be a level of familiarity with one another not found on teams like mine. The bad news is that the pre-deployment training is close to worthless. The SFATs will spend five weeks at their home station focusing primarily on individual military skills (land navigation, weapons usage, patrolling techniques, etc.). Afterwards, they will go to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Ft. Polk where they will receive - wait for it - three weeks of adviser specific training. Three weeks. We are taking soldiers and expecting them to absorb at least four months’ worth of training in three weeks.
I don’t know if the trust between American advisers and their ANSF counterparts is broken for good. But I do know that sending teams of “advisers” to Afghanistan with nothing more than three weeks of training is not likely to help get it back. If advising is the backbone of our exit strategy, and we’re not preparing ourselves properly for the challenges, we shouldn’t be surprised if this strategy fails.
*Based on my one-year deployment to Iraq as an adviser. This isn’t meant to be a sweeping proclamation of how the entire Iraqi army behaves, or how all advisers experience their deployments. There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.
**If you served on an Army or Marine MiTT in Iraq or Afghanistan, I’d love your assessment and thoughts, especially if I missed anything. Please email me at [email protected].
Interesting article, any ideas why it seems the Military is not taking the issue seriously. There still seems to bean attitude of if only we stay a little longer we can WIN! The point is not towin but to get the Afghans to the point they can look after themselves.
We are getting out and the debate is what we leave behind, and how long we go on paying for an Afghan security establishment that the Afghans can not affoard. That is one other big difference with Iraq. Iraq can affoard a significant security force. Afghanistan will have a Kabul Guard and some tribal militia and what the rest of the world will pay for.
I think the biggest reason is that the services don’t like the advisory mission. They don’t like it from a budgetary, roles & missions, or career development perspective. The service chiefs aren’t told to train and equip their forces for advising, so when they get told to do that, it screws up other plans. That’s the problem back in the United States. In theater, advisers are recognized for their job and the necessity of it at a JTF command level and maybe even at the division command level, but it’s at the regiment and battalion level that, unless advising is prioritized in the JTF campaign plan, coalition forces can work at cross purposes to the adviser. This is usually minor stuff like not sharing intelligence with local forces and/or taking the lead or conducting unilateral operations. It seems clear to me that they are replicating the plan from Iraq. Surge forces to establish security and allow space to train and equip ANSF. Begin the transition to ANSF lead. Drawdown leaving only advisers and enablers. Unlike Iraq, however, I think we’ll see a long-term security agreement and U.S. advisers in Afghanistan for years and years. With any luck, they’ll be well-trained advisers who understand their mission.
Think you hit the nail on the head, especially with this:
“Regular military units typically don’t trust you because of your close association with local forces; meanwhile, advisers often see regular units as working at cross-purposes to the advisory mission. ”
I do not see the Army in particular making serious efforts to train advisors. It is almost a hand wave, and this was apparent back in 2003.
“In the last five years, ANSF members have killed more than 75 ISAF military advisers. In 2012, 1 out of every 4 ISAF casualties has been at the hands of a member of the ANSF.”
I am wondering if any analysis has been done of this phenomenon. Are these mainly at tactical teams (brigade-level and below), or ministries, etc.? Is there any “profile” of the likely ANSF assailant-time in ANSF, working relationship with advisors, etc. I’d also be curious if there are any statistics from Vietnam, or other conflicts of similar “infiltration” to kill advisors.
I think that training is critical, but is it linked to the killings? I tend to think that ANSF killings of advisors are not linked to the competence of the advisor teams-in fact, it would be logical for the better teams to be targeted.
Sir,
Thanks for the response. To my knowledge, there has been no study breaking down adviser casualties. I should have perhaps made it clearer that I do not link the deaths of advisers to their (inadequate) training. (As an aside, each time an adviser is killed, I’m always interested to know what kind of base they’re on and what the weapons conditions rules are. Are they in Condition 4? 3? I never went anywhere on my Iraqi base without a Condition 1 pistol. Period. Benefits of being on an Iraqi base away from the flagpole I guess.)
Rather, I think the lack of training will impact SFATs in that they may not understand just how different being an adviser is. If they’re lucky, and they’ve got soldiers who were advisers on previous tours or just “get it”, then they may have some success. But, if they’re team leader is a first time adviser or doesn’t “get it”, then I’m not sure they will have a lot of success. My team’s success was due mostly to the fact that our deputy was a three time adviser and he just got it. His personal leadership made up for a lack of training and went a long way toward getting our team in the right mindset prior to deployment.
If SFATs lack success as advisers, that does not necessarily mean that they’ll be more at risk of green-on-blue violence. It does, however, suggest that they will have trouble (re)building trust with the ANSF. Not having the right frame of mind may lead them to spend their evenings on XBox instead of having chai. My overall point is I do not think that 3 weeks of adviser specific training is enough time to get in the proper adviser mindset.
s/f
You nailed it. I was working with the ANA in 2004-05 and our ETT was a pick-up team with only one month’s knowledge of each other for the most part prior to mobilization. The post-mobilization training was an absolute joke – a colossal waste of time. It was run by a bunch of Army Reservists (not knocking the Reserves as a whole, just those jerks at the mobilization station) who delivered no less than six country briefs… on Iraq! When the lot of us suggested that perhaps we should be getting a brief on Afghanistan, we were told that it was the program of instruction and we could “pick up the specifics” when we got there. The cultural awareness training was erroneous and uninformed – and that’s about the best thing I can say about in print. Why did we spend a full day at the mobilization station in MOPP-4? The unit that was allegedly there to support the ETTs had no use for us; we were actually a thorn in their side as they had better things to do – like the “salsa night”, steak & lobster night at the DFAC and concerts, etc. that were far more pressing than giving folks in the field the support they needed. I’m still trying to figure out why they were there. There were actually US & coalition installations that would not allow ETTs to eat in their chow halls – posted on the doors: No ETTs Allowed. Regular US forces thought ETTs were the ANA or some rogue element not worthy of the same considerations as troops doing a regular mission – like convoy escort of ECP operations. Despite the lack of resources and support, it was a very personally and professionally rewarding experience. But, if this is how the US plans to conduct war, COIN or operations, the US better start making an investment in the program – one commensurate with the desired end-state - otherwise the US is just wasting resources, the most precious of which is the lives of its Soldiers and Marines.
Wow, that sounds awful. I thought out training package was pretty good. My only gripe is that we could have used more language and negotiating training. The TT cell at II MEF in Camp Lejuene had turned out enough teams to have a solid POI. Like I said to another commenter, pre-deployment training and a strong team leader who understand the mission are the two most important determiners of mission success. Thanks for the great comments.
Jonathan,
I certainly agree with your point that, if 3 months was inadequate, 3 weeks will be an order of magnitude worse. But getting a bone-deep understanding and appreciation of this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/world/asia/disconnect-clear-in-us-bafflement-over-2-afghan-responses.html?_r=1&ref=world would help speed matters, because I’ve never seen the difference in mindsets so starkly presented.
Caveats: All opinions and errors of fact expressed below are my own. Trust, but verify. Use what you need, leave the rest.
For the good of the cause:
One of my pet peeves with current media coverage of Afghanistan is the historical ignorance regarding the U.S./Coalition advise-and-assist mission there. The Combined Joint Task Force (C.J.T.F.) Phoenix mission was established in 2003-2004 by the U.S. 10th Mountain Division, then quickly handed-off to rotations of brigade-sized U.S. National Guard headquarters for command-and-control (administrative control?) purposes through the end of mission in 2010. (Incomplete and flawed Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Task_Force_Phoenix)
Vermont’s 86th Brigade Combat Team (B.C.T.) was the last CJTF Phoenix rotation; it converted/reverted to a Full-Spectrum Operations (F.S.O.) mission and configuration while in theater 2010. National Guard BCTs continued as battlespace owners in 2010-2011 (Iowa’s 2-34th BCT) and 2011-2012 (Oklahoma’s 45th BCT, which is currently transitioning out of theater). There do not appear to be any National Guard BCTs currently on FSO missions in Afghanistan; during mobilization, Ohio’s 37th BCT was re-configured to an advise-and-assist mission in Northern Afghanistan. It deployed to Afghanistan in February 2012.
As partially noted by other commenters here, the advisor teams in Afghanistan are labeled Embedded Training Teams (E.T.T.) and/or Operational Mentor Liaison Teams (pronounced “omelets”), apparently depending on whether the region in which they operate is under U.S. or Coalition responsibility.
As a researcher and writer on National Guard topics, I recognize that the use of citizen-soldiers to fulfill the advise-and-assist mission is rich with possible interpretations and implications. For example: On the one hand, these teams were/are more likely to mobilize as individuals familiar with each other, which helps counter some problems inherent to assembling units ad hoc. On the other hand, teams were unlikely to remain together once they arrived downrange.
That National Guard soldiers tend to have civilian-acquired work experiences and skills could anecdotally be seen as an advantage as well. Citizen-soldiers who are law enforcement professionals back home can be used to mentor Afghan National Police, for example. Teachers and coaches, business owners and managers can be more familiar with non-military mentorship models. With the possible exception of the National Guard’s joint Agribusiness Development Teams (A.D.T.), however, in which citizen-soldiers and -airmen are deployed based upon their civilian-acquired agricultural skills, it’s hard to move such assumptions and assertions beyond the anecdotal.
Of course, cynics and skeptics might argue that, if the Foreign Internal Defense-like “advise-and-assist” mission was so sexy and important, then why did military and political leaders relegate the mission to the Reserve Component? “Let the National Guard do it.”
To echo a previous commenter, ETT training suffered from overemphasis of Iraq experiences as late as 2007; I debriefed three teams that, during pre-deployment, they’d repeatedly been told by Fort Riley instructors that “Afghanistan is the same as Iraq.”
In addition to the misunderstandings and biases inherent in relations between active- and reserve-component organizations, the CJTF Phoenix mission was hampered by organizational stovepiping among battlespace owners, who managed the conventional and kinetic fight; special forces; and the ETT/OMLT. There was little coordination or synchronization among the three types of players. That seems to have changed in 2008-2009 (?), when battlespace owners were given direct lead responsibility for Security Force Assistance (S.F.A.) within their respective areas of operation. It’s my understanding, in other words, that for the first time, SFA teams (ETT/OMLT/etc.) reported to the commander of the brigade-level battlespace owner.
“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.”
During the recent Association of the United States Army (A.U.S.A.) convention and trial-balloon festival, there was much talk of assigning the advise-and-assist mission to the Reserve Component. (Other, contradictory balloons: Assign to the Reserve Component most or all of the heavy/armored and field artillery forces.) Proposals to create and train specific advise-and-assist capability, whether in the active- or reserve-components, seem to have stalled. The consensus seems to be that we’ll continue to take such teams ad hoc and out of hide, rather than create MTOE organizations or structure. Everybody wants to grow up to be Patton or Schwarzkopf ; few aspire to be Lawrence of Arabia.
Great comments, thanks for the response. I did not have any experience with NGB or Reserve MiTTs so I can’t speak to their effectiveness. For the record, I don’t suspect they would be any better or worse just because they were reservists. In my experience, pre-deployment training and a strong team leader who understands the mission are the two most important determiners of mission success.
I’m going to take a little bit of the mystery out of Rue’s blog title, but it’s a haunting song and very, very appropriate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHQsTUN_5Jk
Look down and see the bottom
Turn around and let it go
Take a chance and run for cover
And let me know
Take a drink and break a mirror
Build a house and burn it down
Make a wish and run for cover
And let me know
Look out and see the edges
Touch the sun and let it go
Take a chance and spin the bottle
And let me know
Dig a hole and drink the water
Build a house and burn it down
See if you can find the center
And let me know
Change your name
Get on a plane
Don’t stay the same
Wash your face
Don’t stand in place
Try to leave a trace
Take a drink and break a mirror
Build a house and burn it down
Make a wish and run for cover
And let me know
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