Backtalk: The need for advisers

The need for advisers
By Maj. Morgan Smiley

Over the last three years, a great deal of effort has been dedicated to create, advise, mentor and train military and security forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once major combat operations had been scaled back in both theaters, our military recognized the need to turn over internal security issues to the host-nation forces so our troops could concentrate on major threats in U.S. Central Command and other areas, thereby allowing us to reduce our footprintin Iraq and Afghanistan. This led to a need for advisers beyond what our Special Forces could provide, and our military, the Army in particular, began to haphazardly pull personnel from units throughout the force to support this endeavor.

Lt. Col. John Nagl, one of the Army’s recognized counterinsurgency experts, recently proposed the creation of a 20,000-man permanent adviser force within the Army. Unlike previous wars and conflicts such as Philippines, Korea and Vietnam, where we pulled critical personnel from units throughout the Army at the last minute (and then brushed aside the lessons learned from those advisers after the conflict ended), Nagl proposes creating and institutionalizing an adviser force that can be routinely called upon during our current war and in future ones.

Unfortunately, this proposal hasn’t met with a lot of support from Big Army because: The Army is in the process of creating more brigade combat teams; it still needs to maintain current brigades at full strength for upcoming deployments; and 20,000 is a lot of soldiers to dedicate to such a project.

Perhaps a more palatable alternative might be a pool of 20,000 advisers drawn from each of the services (currently, the Air Force and Navy have personnel serving with Army Military Transition Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan), with each service maintaining a 5,000-man adviser pool. Within the Army, a new functional area could be created to identify officers who have completed MiTT training and service. For NCOs, it would be a new skill identifier.


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