National Public Radio has published a relatively bleak assessment of the daunting task faced by the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) when it comes to training a new Iraqi Army. Entitled “Advising Iraqis: Building The Iraqi Army,” the document was written by Lieutenant Colonel Carl D. Grunow of the U.S. Army. You can read the whole thing here. (It’s a PDF, so beware.) Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:
If America agrees with President George W. Bush that failure in Iraq is not an option, then the adviser mission there will clearly be a long-term one. The new Iraqi Army (IA) will need years to become equal to the challenge posed by a persistent insurgent and terrorist threat, and U.S. support is essential to this growth. Having spent a year assigned to the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) equipping and training a new Iraqi armored brigade, I offer some recommendations to future advisers as they take on the job of working with the IA to build a professional and competent fighting force.
[…]
One of the most critical tasks for the army is recruiting and retaining soldiers. Soldiers are under no effective contract, and they always have the option to leave the service. As of this writing, the only power holding them is the promise of a paycheck (not always delivered) and a sense of duty. Good soldiers leave after receiving terrorist threats against their families. Less dutiful soldiers fail to show up for training if they think it will be too hard. In areas where the duty is difficult and deadly, unit AWOL rates approach 40 percent. The old IA executed deserters unhesitatingly; the new army watches powerlessly as soldiers walk away from their posts, knowing full well that the army has no real means to punish them.
[…]
Iraqi soldiers tend to react under fire as though they are in a large-scale attack. They must learn fire discipline and careful target selection in a battlefield filled with noncombatants. Unfortunately, the Iraqi “death blossom” is a common tactic witnessed by nearly every U.S. Soldier who has spent any time outside the wire. Any enemy attack on the IA, whether mortar, sniper, or an improvised explosive device, provokes the average Iraqi soldier to empty his 30 round magazine and fire whatever belt of ammunition happens to be in his machine-gun. Ninety percent of the time, there is no target, and the soldiers always agree that this is extremely dangerous, in addition to being a grievous waste of ammunition. But they continue to do it.
It’s worth reading the whole PDF if you have the time. It’s quite alarming (if not downright depressing). It really makes it sound as if the people of MNSTC-I have been saddled with training the Keystone Cops, doesn’t it? But if reading about this mess isn’t gloomy enough, how about taking a look at a video of American troops trying to conduct calisthenics with Iraqi recruits?
So, without further ado, here’s 29 seconds of pure video hell:
But damn….
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This is an actual piece published the Army’s own professional journal but it was written and published way back in June 2006. MNSTC-I doesn’t even own the advisor teams that this LTC was part of and since it was written an entire training program has been launched at Ft. Riley for deploying advisors. This is an extremely dated article so while I don’t doubt its accuracy at the time it seems strange to publish it now without being clear that it portrays the situation in 2006 and not perhaps in 2008.
I am a veteran of MNSTC-I and while training the Iraqis is never dull they have come a long way in a short time.
Hey, I agree. That’s why I mentioned at the end of the post that I wasn’t sure of the veracity of the video.
And you may well be right about the “aging” of the article, too.
I don’t trust NPR as far as I can throw them, anyway.
Stan,
Although I will keep this somewhat generic for obvious reasons, I was at several Iraqi ITBs (Initial Training Bases- boot camp) in late 2006. It is truly shocking.
The bases are filthy. Picking up trash (even if they are the one who threw it down) s “beneath the diginity” of the jundi (soldier). So a training base which would be spotless in the US, is a massive trash dump in Iraq. Iraqi barracks are pigstyes unless third party contractors come in to clean them, usually people from even poorer Islamic nations, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis. The Ministry of Defense is a smoke-clogged, smelly pile of marble, where the bathrooms have non-western shitters, often covered in feces, and the pull rope for the flush tank is disgustingly stained disease vector I would not touch without immediate recourse to disinfectant. Rmember, most Iraqis don’t use toilet paper.
As said in the article, Iraqi recruits are under no contract. They leave whenever they wish and don’t come back unless they wish. Coalition liasons at the time informed me in casual conversation that some guys would come through Basic 2, 3, even 4 times merely to collect a paycheck for a few weeks, and then go home without ever filling a duty role. The average Iraqi soldier spends at least 10 days/month fucking off at home, and that does not include the 3 day weekends they take whenever they feel like it. If you can find a given soldier before 9 am or after 3 pm, you have found a very dedicated man.
The Iraqis (on average) put in a good, solid 2 days of work per week, spread over 3 or 4 days. Their fire discipline with weapons is execrable. At one exercise at an ITB, about 50 guys standing around a practice checkpoint inside the base had live ammo and jacked us up for practice. I have never in my life had so many hot weapons pointed at me, and with the absolute focus of fear noted fingers inside trigger guards on triggers all over the place.
I have in the past found it funny to see people acting like assholes get put on the ground (particularly officers) at an ECP with a gun at their head. I no longer do, even if they deserve it, it is a grim feeling.
On my knees with my hands on my head, when the guy “searching” me reached for my side arm, and I had to take the risk of popping my hand down and clamping it over my glock in the holster, saying “La La” (no, no) with dozens of guys pointing loaded weapons at me. That is a cardiac workout, that even now thinking about it has my heartbeat a little elevated. The fact that they would have been a “circular firing squad” doesn’t increase my confidence.
We complained to their commander and our Coalition liason, and we didn’t have to go through the motions at that checkpoint any more after that (we had several trips through that part of the base for those couple days with equipment and errands) but they tracked us with vehicle mounted .50s every time, and that is just not comfortable.
The video is very believable to me, having watched marching practice as well.
Now, some things have changed since then, and institutionally some things ar getting better, but the main thesis that things are not going to change quickly is entirely valid. It will take years to train the IA any measure of independent effectiveness. There are too many factors encouraging backsliding, and the organization doesn’t have a robust enough identity to have esprit de corps capable of overcoming apathy in the general populace.
It is comparable to some of the problems I read about where individual African Americans are unwilling to “act white” by seeking education and changing their lifestyle to more middle class values, because they are seen as betraying their people and/or heritage. You’re taking a risk by standing out, and not only because of the newer terrorist threat (which is not trivial), but because Arab culture is very conformist and tribal in the first place. See Raphael Patai’s “The Arab Mind” and Norvell De Atkine’s Why Arabs Lose Wars for some insight into this phenomenon.