As Baghdad melts, the U.S. Army is revamping its efforts to train . . . no, not the Iraqi Army . . . the American trainers for the Iraqi Army. What follows is unfortunately not satire.
At Fort Reilly, in Kansas, General Carter F. Ham and 1,000 of his soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division are restructuring and making improvements in the methods and skills they teach to Advisors who will be sent to Iraq to train Iraqi troops.
According to Saturday's New York Times Advisors are now trained in the removal of IEDs, given "some cultural training," and 50 hours of Arabic lessons. The training lasts 60 days.
One exercise helped trainees understand the need to negotiate tensions between Sunnis and Shiites:
Maj. Andrew Yerkes, who is leading a team that is to advise Iraq’s National Police, was thrust in a difficult situation during a recent exercise. A squabble broke out between a person playing the role of an Iraqi battalion commander and another acting as an Iraqi police captain over how to secure the town, a possible situation since Iraq’s army is largely Shiite and the police in Sunni areas are recruited from local communities. Within minutes, the Iraqi battalion commander stormed off, leaving Major Yerkes and his soldiers to ponder how they might better defuse tensions in the future.
General Ham notes that it would be helpful to train Advisors alongside the American brigades they will be coordinating with as they enter Iraq. But there are other problems, too.
Another constraint is the absence of actual Iraqis . . .
A problem which might have seemed less than impossible to solve.
Qualified Iraqi commanders are needed far more urgently in Iraq, so the roles of commanders, interpreters and townspeople in the exercises are played by American soldiers and contractors who were born in Iraq or are of Arab descent. (The battalion commander in Major Yerkes’s exercise lives in San Diego and left Iraq many years ago.)
I would ask the reader to consider the possible reasons for which "qualified Iraqi commanders" would be needed to play the role of "interpreters and townspeople" for these exercises. If the American advisors in these training situations need to know how the current average "townsperson" of Baghdad (as opposed to someone who left Baghdad years ago) is going to react to the actions of Iraqi troops . . . it would seem helpful to bring current average "townspeople" to Kansas. And then, you know, ask them.
My guess is that finding volunteers would not be difficult.
In another exercise, Major William Cotty (a Special Forces officer training to be an Advisor) led people playing the role of Iraqi soldiers through a mock town; their assignment: capture a suspected insurgent.
Major Cotty helped the “Iraqis” plan a raid to capture a suspected insurgent in the fictional town of Surdash, speaking through an interpreter to the battalion commander, in this case an Arabic-speaking American soldier who was born in Sudan. In the exercise, the operation led to a firefight in which a suspected insurgent was killed. The “Iraqis” hauled away a captive and began to pummel him as an angry crowd began yelling at the Americans. In an effort to disperse the crowd, Major Cotty fired several blanks into the air.
One lesson Major Cotty learned from this exercise was to make sure that the suspected insurgent was not the target of a vendetta by the Iraqi troops he was advising. Another lesson was that firing shots into the air was not a good way to warn away crowds of Iraqi civilians, since this might cause the Iraqi troops under his tutelege to fire their guns randomly.
(The people playing the role of "Iraqi troops" apparently knew to fire randomly.)
In after-exercise assesment, it was decided that Major Cotter might want to bring a loudspeaker next time.
“According to the book on direct action, I had speed, surprise and violence of action,” he said. “The number one thing I probably took away from this was the loudspeaker,” he said.
We are now 3 years and 8 months into Bush's Iraq endevour. We're learning that, when entering crowds, we need to bring loudspeakers.