Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan takes a thoughtful look at the recent failure of the Iraq and Afghan militaries. And they have failed — spectacularly. At Mosul, entire divisions of the Iraqi Army – despite billions of dollars and years of American training — essentially dissolved in the face of a much smaller, poorly-equipped jihadist army. At Kunduz, a small Taliban force chased the Afghan Army out of the city until an American-backed counterattack. The list of failures could go on and on, while the truly independent military successes are few and far between. Why?
Kaplan rightly notes that training effective military forces is extraordinarily difficult, especially when the goal is to create a combined-arms military that at least somewhat mimics American tactics and capabilities:
Military training is more complicated than many realize. True, the Taliban, al-Qaida, and ISIS don’t require advanced training for its recruits, so, it’s often asked, why should the Afghan or Iraqi army? But the two tasks are different. Insurgents can attack at a time and place of their choosing; if met with force, they can withdraw and attack someplace else. By contrast, armies defending the government have to be strong and ready everywhere, or they need to have the means to move quickly from one place to another.
So training is not just a matter of teaching soldiers how to shoot straight and maneuver on a battlefield (which American trainers do well). If the goal is to turn the fighting completely over to the local armed forces, then training must also involve teaching them how to conduct and call in air strikes, gather intelligence and apply it to tactical operations, move soldiers rapidly from one area to another (which involves flying helicopters or small transport planes), resupply soldiers when they’re deployed far from the base (logistics), and plan operations on a strategic or theater-wide level.
And the task is made all the more difficult by the incredible levels of corruption that plague American-backed governments:
Then again, there are other reasons for the failure of training, and they have little to do with the lack of a specialized American advisory corps. In several of the insurgency wars we’ve joined in the past several decades, the local elites—who sign on to be our allies—are corrupt or incompetent at running their countries. The local soldiers feel little loyalty to their commanders or their leaders, while the insurgent rebels are very energized by their cause. No matter how well Americans—or any outsiders—might train and advise such soldiers, they are unlikely to win because they have no desire to risk dying while fighting.
I would also add that our trainers face an almost-insurmountable cultural challenge — trying to take a group of men who mainly understand fighting for faith and tribe in the kind of no-rules savagery that characterizes tribal and jihadist conflict and transforming them into a national army fighting according to western methods and western rules.
You simply can’t take masses of poorly-educated troops, hand them over to incompetent, corrupt commanders (the corruption has to be seen to be believed), and expect even years of engagement with small groups of American trainers to make a meaningful cultural difference. While local army units can fight reasonably well supported by American air power with American troops either embedded in their units or close by to render immediate support, the instant you remove the American or allied presence all but the most “elite” local units have a disturbing tendency to drop their weapons and run in the face of a determined attack. We’ve had success working with Kurds, but that merely reaffirms the importance of ethnic/tribal affiliation in creating an effective fighting force. We had some limited success during the Surge working with sympathetic tribes in Iraq. But its’ one thing to win over a tribe — it’s another thing entirely to integrate tribal warriors into a mechanized infantry division.
Our ideals often defeat us. We want to take a backwards, tribal society, transform it into a functioning nation-state defended by a multi-ethnic army, and do so while complying fully not just with the laws of war but with absurd rules of engagement and absurd and misguided notions of cultural sensitivity. We can defeat enemies. We can prop up friends. But we’ve yet to demonstrate that we can truly transform a military and political culture — at least not without engaging in a level of domination and control that the current political class utterly rejects.